


AQUARIUM

by EllieCarina



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars VIII: The Last Jedi
Genre: Bed-sharing, Enemies to Lovers, F/M, MoMA, Modern AU, Museum of Modern Art, New York City, Performance Art, Rey Kenobi, Romantic Comedy, actor!kylo, actor!rey, basically that is the entire story, bickering and bantering, just a liiiittle, none too graphic smut, rated mature for now, rom com, so much semi-voluntary bed-sharing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-29
Updated: 2017-11-23
Packaged: 2019-01-26 08:16:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 24,667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12553164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EllieCarina/pseuds/EllieCarina
Summary: L. SkywalkerAmerican, born 1978AQUARIUM 2015/2018Living artists, glass, steel, bedroom furniture,linen, laptop, phones, plants, assorted fruitsCourtesy of the Artist#####Strangely enough, seven days spent in a bed with a stranger for excellent pay doesn't seem too bad a perspective for Rey Kenobi. And since work isn’t easy to come by in New York City these days, let alone for a newcomer actress that, apparently, no one has been waiting for, Rey takes an unusual job: as living art in a performance piece by world famous artist L. Skywalker. For a week (AND EXCELLENT PAY!) she has to spend her days in a room inside a room at the MoMa. So far, so weird. But when her mattress-mate turns out to be an old, very unfortunate acquaintance, their tiny fake bedroom turns out to be a whole lot tinier than Rey had anticipated.





	1. DAY ONE

**Author's Note:**

> Hello friends. The plot bug has bitten me once again and I'm very happy to present you with this new piece. It will be an 8-chapter Modern-AU-romcom-short story. 
> 
> Please, if you liked it, leave a like and/or a comment and subscribe-as you know, that's what brings all the boys to the yard and the writers writing faster ;)
> 
> If you want, you can also find me on tumblr @jackpotgirl and follow the tag #reyloaquarium for updates and art for this story.

 

 

There’s a certain calm on public transportation, even in a mega city like New York. The fact that while the train is moving no one can get anywhere any faster, takes the constant bustle out of things, people calm down, they stop, pause and wait. As the F-train rattles around her, Rey hopes that the 40 minutes to her destination stretch out a little longer. Not that she isn’t excited for her new job, she is. In a way. At the very least for the pay-day at the end of the week ahead. But there’s a rumble in the pit of her stomach every time she thinks about what that job is going to entail for the next couple of days. When her agency forwarded her the ad, she’d been about ready to split. To her, it had seemed like bottom of the barrell work at first glance: “Discrete actress wanted for art project at the MoMa - must be comfortable with intimacy and available for at least 8 hours daily from June 11th to 17th. Up to clothes size L, any ethnicity. Excellent pay. Brief audition required.”

 

“Discrete actress?” She had asked her agent, a feisty blonde called Kaydel K. Connix, who was about Rey’s age and apparently had to deal with all the not-so-well-doing newly signed clients, as Rey undoubtedly was one. “That sounds like a porn gig. At a museum.”

“It’s not porn, Rey,” Kaydel said patiently. “It’s an art performance. You’d spend a week in a bedroom inside MoMa for the visitors to observe. It gives a lot of exposure, many people will see you. And the pay is excellent. I’m sure I don’t need to remind you that your headshots didn’t come out as nicely as we’d hoped...this pay would cover the cost to have them redone and then some.”

“Yes, I get it,” Rey had said tightly, not particularly keen on being reminded of just how broke she was and how many things still needed paying. A year ago she’d had believed London was unaffordable but New York was even worse. Mostly because she’d had steady work at the West End and Broadway just didn’t seem to want her. “Still, it sounds fishy, that ‘discrete’ bit.”

“Oh, don’t be silly,” Kay laughed. “That just means it’s supposed to look like you and the guy they have are actually a couple. The project kind of relies on that...watching real love under a microscope or something like that. So you won’t be putting this in your resume as an acting gig. You’ll just be discreet about not seeing the dude in real life. Nothing raunchy about it.”

“So, they want me to lie to my friends?” Rey furrowed her brow.

“Don’t be so dramatic,” her agent sighed. “You don’t have to tell them nothing. You’re not required to lie. You just gotta keep up appearances. Listen, do you want to go meet with them or not? The artist is a pretty big deal with great connections from what I gather. All I’m saying is, it can’t hurt.”

 

Before long, Rey had agreed with Kaydel and went in to meet this artist she had never heard of before. L. Skywalker, the L stood for Luke, he told her, almost grandfatherly with a pleasant smile and a pat on the shoulder, didn’t carry himself like a big deal but he _was_. That much Rey had eventually gathered from her research. She always liked to go into auditions and meetings prepared, finding out every detail she could about her potential future employers and learning them by heart, like lines learned for a play. Skywalker had started early and had somewhat revolutionised the art of performing in a museal context by making himself an exhibit. The AQUARIUM, as the project Rey was meeting him for was called, had been the last in a string of extended performances and the first in which Luke wasn’t the artist on display. “Getting a bit too old for that sort of thing,” he had told her with a grin. Rey, sitting in a very pleasant meeting with him, recalled the press release Google had turned up for the performance.

 

Since the early 1990s, L. Skywalker has been pushing past perceived limits of the body and mind, and exploring the complex relationship between artist and audience, through performances that challenged once both himself and, in many instances, participants emotionally, intellectually, and physically. The concepts inspiring his works are key, as was the use of his own body to convey her ideas. He has been making art since childhood, and realized early on that it did not have to be produced in a studio, or even take a concrete form. “I understood that…I could make art with everything…and the most important [thing] is the concept,” he relates. “And this was the beginning of my performance art. And the first time I put my body in front of [an] audience, I understood: this is my media.”

In 2015 at MoMA, Skywalker premiered the first extended performance where he used other artists, titled _AQUARIUM_. The work was inspired by his belief that stretching the length of a performance beyond expectations serves to alter our perception of time and foster a deeper engagement in the experience. In an elaborate bedroom-set, a couple spends a week under the gazes of strangers, sharing anything from food to intimacy, most of the time in bed. Over the course of nearly three months, with rotating couples, for seven hours a day, visitors share in the perceived normalcy of a human relationship on display.

“It raises our daily life to art,” Skywalker explained. “Love is the art here, the couple a medium and the world is invited to watch it. Constantly. It’s a sort of big brother concept but with the mundane in focus. Like a fish tank. Hence the title.”

In 2018, AQUARIUM gets a new two month installment at the Museum of Modern Art.

 

“It takes some getting used to,” Skywalker had told her over cups of exquisite upper west-side-restaurant coffee, “having people watch you at all times. But then again, you’re an actress, so I think you’ll do just fine.”

He paused for a second and studied her, glancing off to his assistant who sat one table over, plastic nails hammering and clicking away on her tablet, as if he was gauging if she could hear. He leaned forward to Rey, conspiratory in an adorable way and almost whispered when he spoke: “They don’t like me talking about the actor part too loudly. Something about the promotion riding on you guys being a real couple but I think it makes no difference in the end. The project is about watching two people spend time together. I just used couples the first time around because I had some on hand. For the first three weeks, we managed to find some too but from then on out, we’re out of luck for the real thing. All these break ups nowadays, you know. Ah, and I’m blabbering again, like an old fool.”

“Not a problem at all, Mr. Skywalker,” Rey had replied dutifully, finding that she liked him a lot more than she would have thought going in.

“Please, call me Luke,” he’d insisted. “The most important thing is that you are okay with being close to someone physically. You’ll be spending a lot of time in a very small space together, so you should not be squeamish about physical intimacy.”

“I’m not,” Rey hurried to assure. It wasn’t all the way true, because she still had some reservations about going from zero to ten-thousand on the intimacy scale with a perfect stranger–but she really _did_ need the money enough to push away these reservations. “I trust that the guy you’ve picked will be nice and everything, so that shouldn’t be a problem at all.”

“Ah, yes,” Luke had smiled, though it didn’t ring all the way true. “Your partner in crime will be my nephew, Ben. He’s an actor as well. He was supposed to go in with his girlfriend but...you know how it is. Nothing lasts forever.”

“Yeah, I see,” Rey nodded. “So, should I be your pick, will I meet...Ben, was it? Beforehand?”

“Unfortunately he is currently touring with a production of Sweeney Todd, all the way in California right now, if I remember correctly, and won’t get back until the night before you go into the aquarium, so no. I’m afraid you will be having a blind date.” Luke laughed a little and then patted her hand, like an old, kind uncle. “But Ben does….have his charms. I think you will get along just fine.”

 

In a subway tunnel underneath the East River, that pause Luke had made before saying this Ben, this actor nephew of his, “had his charms”, worries Rey. When she’d gotten the call affirming that she got the job, none of that had mattered though, because for the first time in forever she’d actually gotten a job and all that money for just a week’s worth of work was a godsend. But now, with Manhattan and the museum getting closer by the second, her nerves get the better of her.

To distract herself, Rey checks her phone and re-reads her room-mate-text chain. Rose had wished her a lot of fun, Finn made a stupid joke and Poe just sent a string of emojis, before the group had turned back to the logistics of daily studio-sharing life. She misses them already. She never thought she would come to like living in a 40 square metre studio with three other people quite as much as she did, but she can’t imagine living anywhere else right now. Whenever she gets home from another failed audition or misses London, she always has someone there to listen–either Rose with her positivity and endless enthusiasm, or Finn with his sense of humour and ceaseless weekend distractions (‘Gospel service at our church, no excuses!’), or Poe with his dry wit and no-bullshit attitude, telling her periodically that he is always right because he is that much older than all of them.

They’re lovely and they’re all wishing her a great time, even though none of them really know what she’s doing. In spirit of her discreteness, Rey had merely cited an “art project in Manhattan” and that was that. She wonders what they would think if they knew. She’s sure Finn would have a blast teasing her about it. She can almost hear him going on and on about cuddling with a stranger in front of more strangers. And he would not be wrong. It’s weird, it’s bound to be. But she has agreed to do it and the money is good, so she will. It’s art, after all and she always wanted to create it. Now she gets to. By lying in a bed. Surely, there could be worse ways to do that.

 

Content with this way of looking at it, Rey exits the subway station at Rockefeller Center with a swing to her step. Trying on a smile for good measure. As she walks past a shiny row of windows, she checks her reflection. Her white socks were a good choice this morning, fitting well with her black trainers and black mini skirt underneath an oversized red-shirt, hanging loose and comfortable on her slim frame. She is wearing her hair up, in a high bun she could only recently coax her mid-length brown curls into again, and barely any make-up on her peachy, pale cheeks. She nods to herself, knowing she looks okay. Worrying about her appearance had thankfully never been an issue. But then again it seems that in lieu of all that to worry about, she just worries about everything else more.

 _Just not right now_ , she resolves. Now, she will keep her head up and walk into the back entrance of the MoMa, meet Luke and the museum people and Ben and he will turn out to be charming and pleasant, as will the whole experience, and everything will be just fine.

 

She turns the corner unto West 53rd street and the MoMa appears in front of her, all cubes, tall and inviting. It’s eight in the morning, so there’s nobody there yet but Rey has been asked to get to the employees entrance all the same. She tells her name to the security guard inside and continues on, the temperature colder from the air conditioning than it was outside. Her legs prickle with goosebumps when she comes up to the elevator. Once the doors close, they prickle with nerves again. _Show time_.

 

“Are you Rey?” A voice calls from the left as soon as she has stepped out of the elevator into a spacious corridor and a woman with a stack of folders comes up to her. “They’re waiting for you in Special Exhibitions on floor two. Just down the stairs there, through the door on the right. Then you should hear them. I’ll be right down with the reporters.”

 _Reporters_? It echoes in Rey’s brain but her body is on autopilot, carrying her down and away, around a few more corners and the first pieces of art, she still only barely registers. From a further off room, she can hear voices. She follows the sound and happens upon a group of people, huddled together. There’s Luke, in concentrated conversation with an older man and what looks to be the older man’s assistant, a staunch, unusually tall lady taking notes, her head darting from one to the other. There’s another guy, with fiercely red hair fixing something at a glass pane Rey can’t see behind and next to him, another tall man, eyeing him warily. “That’s not straight,” Rey can hear him say to the red-head, who seems displeased at best and short of yelling at worse. Rey steps hesitantly forward and then Luke looks up and sees her.

 

“Ah, Rey, there you are. Perfect,” he says and beckons her forward to meet everybody. “This is the curator, Mr. Snoke, his assistant Phasma, over there is Hux, who’s helping in the back and last but not least, my nephew, Ben.”

It all goes too fast Rey is still nodding at Mr. Snoke, trying not to giggle at the strange name, when she has already shaken everyone’s hand and stands face to collarbone with what must be Ben. She glances up into an angular face, stunning, intense eyes under thin brows, a big, pointed nose and a set of puffy, soft-looking lips with a thin beard above the upper lip and then a patch of beard on his chin. Big ears peak out under thick black hair and he nods at her, squeezing her hand and then dropping it.

“Hi, call me Kylo. No one really uses Ben anymore” he says with a sideway glance at his uncle. And then Rey remembers.

 

She’s thrown back to two years ago fast enough to give her whiplash, back to when she’d just started out in New York. It was only her second audition in town and there he’d been. The same tall man, the same unusual features, and that silly stage name. Kylo Ren.

He read with her in the second round of casting for an Off-Broadway straight play. A fight scene, with training swords. Rey had gotten the choreography mostly right but apparently the man was having a really bad day because he was relentless with her, groaning impatiently whenever she mis-stepped or didn’t reach her arms up far enough and when it was his turn to charge at her, he did not even pretend to go easy. He was literally fighting her, throwing her completely off balance. After some minutes of this, Rey lost her nerve and shoved him. To her great astonishment, he shoved her back - and hard enough that she landed so very ungracefully on her bottom.

“Are you insane?” She’d half yelled, jumping back to her feet like a ball of fury, her accent thick and with an ugly Cockney-tint from frustration. “This is an audition, no’ a fuckin’ fencing turnamen’!”

“Fuck, and she’s british, too?” Kylo had said, not to her but straight at the creatives table. None of them looked like they were surprised by what had just unfolded. “No. Get the next one.”

And just like that, her audition had been over. Apparently this Kylo person had more than a little say in the process and he’d deemed her unfit. Not that she had wanted anything to do with him after, but she was still pissed off. It was a damn good play, original, sensitive, smart and funny and she would have given several arms to play the female lead–because for once it had been a nuanced and challenging part, relying not on looks and tropes but meaty, smart dialogue that had her almost in tears even during the first round of auditions. He had fucked that up for her. And of course the play went on to get amazing press and move to Broadway after a season to raving reviews with that stupid, stupid stage name in every last one of them. Telling of a great, riveting performance with intensity and honesty, showing so much talent that everyone was sure they’d found a new NYC-theatre-district-household name. Rey hated it. Especially after she reluctantly joined some friends to see the production had to agree with the papers. Kylo Ren, it turned out, really is an amazingly gifted actor. And an immense, arrogant, no-good arse as well. And now she will be spending seven hours in a bed with him for seven days straight.

 

Recognition does not pass over his features though as he seizes her up, dark eyes lingering on her face for a second before he looks over to his uncle nods, and then back at her.

“You have been briefed for the interviews coming up?” He asks her and it takes her a moment to unlock her jaw from the angry grip it’s fallen into.

She shakes her head to be safe, still. He sighs exasperatedly, as if her lack of briefing had been somehow her fault. Arrogant. No-good. Arse.

“There’s a couple of journalists coming to interview me and my uncle about the performance. You’re not really required to say anything but if they want to talk to you, just say you’re my girlfriend and when I asked you to participate you were sceptical at first but then did it for the art, something like that. You get it.”

With that, Rey turns to Luke, her voice tightly reined in and low, trying and failing to keep her accent subdued: “You said I wouldn’t have to lie.”

Like a gunshot, Kylo takes a step away from her. “So it _is_ you,” he says, eyes wide and expression unreadable. Apparently, he _does_ remember her, then.

“Yes it is,” she spews back before she can help herself, “did you want to get the next girl in? Has my walking over here not been to your liking, _your Highness_?”

“I can see you’re upset,” he retorts calmly, dry as a bone and just like that, Rey is ready to claw his eyes out with her bare hands.

“Well, I ought to be, don’t you reckon?” Rey says, sheepishly and quieter now, feeling all eyes on her, most of all the cold, beady ones of Mr. Snoke that make her eerily uncomfortable. And suddenly she is afraid of being sent home.

“Is there a problem here, miss?” The curator asks and Rey hardly dares to meet his eyes.

“No, sir,” she says and when she rattles her brain for some throw-away phrase to end with, Kylo interrupts.

“We’re old acquaintances, that was just a little... _improv hello_ , all in good fun,” he says and wraps one of his giant arms around her shoulders, the weight pushing her into the floor. “Nothing to worry about. We’re good to go, aren’t we, Rey?”

“Very well, then I’ll let the reporters in now,” the wrinkly, pale man says, not waiting for her to answer and walks away, his assistant and Luke trailing behind in some logistics conversation.

“Let go of me,” Rey hisses and wiggles out from under Kylo’s grip as soon as they are out of ear-shot.

“You’re gonna have to get used to it, sweetheart,” he says with a douchey raised eyebrow, “You’re my girlfriend now, remember?”

“What, so this time I’m good enough?” She challenges and glares at him, feeling her cheeks flush with frustration. This is the exact opposite of what she hoped for all morning.

“This time there’s none of your pathetic fencing skills required,” he replies with an arrogant ease that makes her blood boil. “Plus, there’s no time to find a replacement.”

Rey should walk away for that alone. That would show him! Do his precious performance of playing a couple all by himself...with his hand for company maybe. But then again, it’s Luke’s art, not Kylo’s, and Luke had been so very nice to her. Plus, there’s the money. She really does need that money. So, under great strain, she keeps her mouth shut and yields herself to silent grudging. She’s still trying to come up with some snide last word though, when Luke comes back with a small huddle of journalists in tow.

 

Skywalker is already chatting away with them and nods at Rey before taking the group around Kylo’s broad frame to the large piece of glass the ginger guy has been silently working on until now. Rey sees him step away from it, understanding that he has just put the finishing touches on the typography on the glass. In the upper left corner  in some unspectacular, no-serif font, in fat, all caps-letters it says “AQUARIUM”.

So this is it, her home for the next couple of days. The room behind the glass is box shaped, with thick drywall making it impossible to see into from the sides and only the floor-high glass pane allowing spectators a view inside. It’s scarcely spacious, but a lovingly set-up bedroom all the same; a queen-sized bed is propped to the left wall, with white sheets on it and wooden bedside tables on either side. There is more furniture: a small dresser with picture frames hanging over it, fake plants and a bookshelf, a chair, a fluffy carpet and paper lamps hanging from the ceiling, which is a steel construction decked with more dry-wall. It looks like an IKEA display, it’s pretent normalcy eerie in its artificialness on second glance, made even more so by the cold museum light. This is an exhibition set-up and Rey feels uncomfortably reminded of zoos. Anxious that she is going to be the animal on display in there very shortly.

Meanwhile, Luke has been monologuing away to the reporters, their dictaphones recording everything, one or the other interjecting a question here and there. Rey listens, trying to get her mind off of the tall, dark, arsehole next to her, when Luke, with no prompting it seems, stears the attention to the two of them. With a trained grace and ease that perplexes Rey into a double-take, Kylo takes over the reins and starts talking easily about how, after months of touring, he is happy to be back in New York and support his uncle’s very important vision and become part of a piece of art in a way different from what he’s used to. He says it will be a nice exclamation point to his years on the stage before starting to shoot on a new HBO series in the fall.

 _Great, so he’s gonna be on television now too_ , Rey thinks, _fan-fucking-tastic. Good for him._

“Isn’t it, love?” Kylo asks her from the side and she turns her head to him.

 _Shit_ , did he just read her mind or has he said something to her before? He must have done the latter, since every last one of the reporters is looking at her expectantly. _Curse the sod. Curse him to all fucking hells_.

“Pardon me, what was the question?” She asks, her cheeks flaring red but her expression a sickly sweet mask she knows by heart from always being cast to play the “cute, unthreatening girl from next door” or “well-mannered Governor's daughter”.

“It’s an interesting challenge for our relationship,” Kylo repeats with a dangerous flicker in his eye and tightness around his lips only she can see because she is close enough. “To spend so much time so closely.”

“Well yeah,” she answers and thinks on her feet, loathing that she has to lie for this and him and everything. Still you would never know it. When she continues, she sounds like molasses, blissful in love and oh so charming: “I mean I could spend every waking second with Ben, I love him. And he’s been gone so long, I’m really quite happy to have him all to myself for a week. Well, almost all to myself, what with the visitors and such.”

Kylo smiles at her but he winced slightly when she’d called him Ben and she likes it. That was on purpose and by annoying him, it had the desired effect. It’s also not a half bad idea, because the journalists are eating it up, some even taking out their phones to snap a couple of pictures of them. Kylo takes back over, shifting the conversation expertly back to his future endeavors and then back to Luke. Until the interview is over and everyone has trickled back out of the exhibition hall, he doesn’t acknowledge her any further.

 

“The name is Kylo,” he says, once the coast is clear.

“Oh, come on, you know they loved it,” she snaps back, rolling her eyes at his extra-ness.

“I don’t care,” he reiterates, jaw tight. “Ben Solo is dead. I will not have that name used around me. It’s enough that Luke can’t be taught.”

“Aren’t you the little drama queen,” Rey mutters under her breath and turns away, her feet nearly stomping as she stalks off.

“And where are _you_ going?” Kylo calls after her with his voice raised in annoyance.

Rey whips around and clamours: “The _ladies_. Do you wanna join me?”

He has the grace to bow his head and let her go in peace.

 

In the bathroom, Rey stares at her reflection in the mirror and debates if she can still get out of this. But she doesn’t see a way. She has signed a contact, already lied to a bunch of journalists and needs the paycheck as well as being in Luke’s good graces for his apparently great connections. Still, the thought of spending seven days - seven days! - in bed with that monster, is so mortifying it makes her throat get all stuck and tight. Her brown eyes stare back at her and she sighs. It’s no use at all. She has to go back out there. First, though, she quickly fishes her phone from the canvas bag slung around her right shoulder and texts her room mates.

“The guy I’m doing this project with is an effin nightmare >.< I’ll tell you all about it tonight, wish me luck!” She waits longer than necessary for any immediate responses but gets none. Her friends are all at work. Rey is alone in this. And it’s high time she came back out if she doesn’t want everyone to think she just took a giant dump. Not that she wouldn’t prefer that from going back out there. Alas, she has no choice.

 

Back in the exhibition hall, it takes Rey a moment to find the others, Luke, Kylo and the ginger, Hux, she thinks his name was, having disappeared into an almost hidden door in the right part of drywall around the aquarium, into something Luke explained to her was the “Control Room”. It wasn’t so much as room as merely a tiny sliver of space, barely large enough to hold a table and chair, as well as a small fridge and a console on the table with a couple of buttons and switches.

“These regulate the temperature and lights in there, as well as the comm. Someone will keep you updated on the time every hour or so and tell you when there’s food for you. You’ll get breakfast every morning and take-out for lunch and dinner, you can just text us whatever you like from in there.” Luke nods his head towards another door, this one a sliding door with a thick black curtain in front of it, now pushed to the side. Rey guesses it will be shut once the museum opens, so as to not destroy the illusion when one of them leaves the fish tank.

“Please use your phones only for that purpose, or when you want to use the bathroom. We’re trying to keep the experience very human,” Luke continues. “No being on the phone for other reasons. You can watch sitcoms on the laptop but only one episode per hour, it’s no fun watching people watch movies all day.”

Rey nods along, although she doesn’t really look forward to all the time in an hour where she can not pretend to focus on some sitcom. The forty minutes of each hour that she was going to have to play Kylo’s love-crazed girlfriend and what? Cuddle with him? Make conversation? It just now dawns on her that she has nothing to say to him and very little interest in getting to know him in the first place and he probably feels exactly the same way about her. Her skin crawls. She wants to run but there’s nowhere to go. She’ll just have to brave it and be a big girl. If only her fluttering heart, in flight-mode, would agree.

None the wiser about Rey’s secret panic attack, Luke just keeps racing through the ‘rules of the tank’. “We encourage you to be intimate, kiss and make out, if you like,” he says easily. “If you want to have sex, you can, just make sure the nether parts stay under the blanket because of the children.”

Rey almost chokes on her tongue. _If they want to have what now?_ Her body goes instantly rigid and Kylo adjusts his stance next to her too. She prays to the universe it’s from discomfort and not excitement, although nothing points into the direction that the latter would be the case. From all she knows, Kylo thinks she’s an untalented, dull clutz. All the same, the thought of going at it with him in there, let alone to the point of having actual intercourse, makes her hairs stand up in advance-humiliation. True, she had consented to the basic groping required for this project, or performance, or installation or whatever Luke wanted it called…but she had not signed on for sex with a stranger in front of more strangers. Least of all with _this_ stranger.

“Don’t worry, I won’t jump you,” Kylo says, peeking down at her from thick lashes and a furrowed brow.

“I shouldn’t fucking hope so,” she mutters so quietly that hopefully only Kylo can hear.

This is ridiculous. Luke looks at her from the console he’d just been working on and catches on to the shift in the atmosphere: “That’s not to say you’re in any way required to have sex. This is just the general rules, you remember we do have real couples in here–and some of them, let’s say they found the audience quite...thrilling. So the reminder of the blankets isn’t in there for no reason.” She can’t be sure but she believes he winks before he goes on: “Anyway, you just act like a normal couple, no need to go overboard. As long as it’s all nice and convincing.”

Rey swallows hard. Whatever has she gotten herself into?

 

“Ah, almost ten thirty now,” Luke says when neither her nor Kylo speak. “Time to get cozy. Just through here-” He points at another curtain behind the table and chair, “You can change into your PJs Rey, Kylo can change here and once you’re all settled, you can go into the aquarium. There’s fresh coffee waiting and some breakfast bagels and assorted fruits. Doors is in about half an hour. Oh, and remember–with the fish tank, it’s with television: don’t look directly into people’s eyes, it destroys the illusion.”

With this, Luke leaves them in an awkward silence and when Kylo starts tugging down his jeans, Rey almost falls backward and goes to hide behind the curtain of her changing spot where she trades her skirt and shirt for a white tank and soft blue pyjama pants. At least she’s dressed comfortably when everything else feels everything but.

When she returns, Kylo has already moved to the aquarium. She steps inside after him and takes in the room once again. From here, it seems real enough, had it not been for the missing fourth wall that reveals the oblong exhibition hall, a big one on the second floor, with a bunch of other installation art scattered on the ground and walls. Most prominently, there’s a set of bronze plates, molded and sculpted to look like mechanical waves. It’s a fitting sight from inside a fish tank, Rey thinks.

Kylo is standing confidently in the middle of the room, one hand lifting a mug of steaming coffee to his lips, the other smoothing down his white shirt and adjusting his grey sweat pants, both revealing well defined mass and Rey briefly wonders how this giant man will ever be comfortable in this normal-sized bed. Then she wonders what it is about grey sweat pants that reveals exactly what men are packing underneath and if there maybe shouldn’t be some kind of rule against that. Because it’s so utterly _distracting_.

“So we could get into bed, if you’re done checking me out,” Kylo says like a shot, and Rey goes fire-red, cursing herself for only now realising that she’d been staring, with a slightly open mouth, like a dim-wit.

“I’m getting into character,” she says sheepishly and averts her eyes. Darting, instead, onto the mattress to have something other to do than die from shame.

“Sure you are,” he says and looks down at her while she ungracefully climbs in and pulls the comforter up to under her chin. “Coffee, _sweetheart_?”

She nods, holding back the urge to groan, this is already shaping up to become such a long week.

“You settled in? Ready to go?” Luke’s voice comes back mechanically over the comm and Kylo shouts a “Yes!” back before Rey can protest.

No, she isn’t ready, not by a long shot. It can’t be helped though and before Rey has finished sipping her coffee and half-heartedly nibbling on a couple of grapes, the first tentative museum goers enter the exhibition hall and make a beeline to watch the humans on display.

“Ready to give them a show?” Kylo says and leans back against the headboard with an ease like he was being watched in his private life at all times anyway.

“Born ready,” Rey replies and sits up to match him. It sounds fake even to her own ears. “Just don’t get any ideas. I’m not going to do any funny business with you in here.” Kylo looks at her quizzically, a small, wicked smile playing on his lips and she realizes her error. “Or _anywhere_ , for that matter.” She adds hastily and for good measure: “I think you’re a git.”

“I’m not your biggest fan either,” he says, but with a dazzling grin that isn’t for her but for the five more visitors that have gathered in front of their glass wall. Rey can see their reflections in the picture frames.

“This feels like being a mannequin at the mall,” Rey mutters and Kylo chuckles a lazy laugh.

“Well, it’s not the mall, it’s the MoMa,” her bedfellow says and then, to her surprise, whisks her mug from her grasp, sets it aside and maneuvers her easily into his arms. He pulls her down until they’re lying flat, him spooning her in. “Just try and sleep for a bit, it’s just seven more hours.”

 

Rey gets out of the museum at 6PM that day, feeling a hundred years older. The day with Kylo had been riddled with uncomfortable silences and fake cuddles. He hadn’t dared to go further–and all the better for him–but even on the train back to Brooklyn, she can still feels his arms and broad frame encasing her, the warmth of his body seeping into hers while they lay in silence. They hadn’t talked much all together, only bickered from time to time, quarreling about what sitcom to watch and what food to get, all the while being all smiles for the gawkers. The visitors came in a steady stream, never ceasing, around the midday-hours there had been so many people watching them that hardly any sunlight reached through to Kylo and her and he had to turn on his bed-side lamp to continue reading. It was so bizarre, they weren’t even really doing anything for all intents and purposes but people were staring at them like their inaction was prime entertainment. Still, the watchers weren’t half as bad as having Kylo around, sitting there in his smugness feeling great about himself and obviously looking down on Rey, treating her like she was all but a prop for his performance. She hadn’t talked to him about anything other than things at hand, hadn’t wanted to. But neither had he. He hadn’t even asked her what she was doing outside of giving the part of goldfish in a museum with him. He is just rude. Rude and tall and warm. And she can’t stand him.

She is so enthralled in her antipathy, the forty minutes back to her studio feel like ten and back home, it takes a few flutes of prosecco and three nicked drags from one of Poe’s cigarettes until she can begin to tell her room mates the whole terrible story. It takes another bottle of prosecco and two entire cigarettes until she can go lie down.

 _Well, I have the entire rest of the week to spend in bed_ , she thinks to herself with grim humor, right before she falls into an uneasy sleep.

 


	2. DAY TWO

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for all the comments, subs and kudos! 
> 
> I really want to put this chapter out tonight for the sake of trying to get this story done in November BUT be warned, this is un-beta'd and I'll only get to correcting the inevitable mistakes tomorrow. So know that you'll find some of those in there.
> 
> I hope you can forgive me for now and enjoy the chapter anyway! I'm sure you'll notice that most of this story is going to be -mostly due to our heroes circumstances- set up as an "intimate play", meaning a continued dialogue between them and scenes with only the two of them present. I hope that's okay with you.
> 
> Now..on to day two.

DAY TWO

 

Rey wakes up with a softly pounding headache at the back of her eyes, courtesy of the one and a half bottles of prosecco she’d insisted on downing the night before. And for what? The promise of sound sleep. But that wasn’t what she had gotten. Instead, she had twisted her sheets and turned around so many times that Rose had woken up eventually and padded on her tiny feet over to Rey to give her a talking-to. In Rose’s terms, it was a genuine freak-out but her temper was so mild and positive, once you knew how people like Poe and Finn got upset, Rose was a happy clam, even when rattled. So Rey had tried to sleep even harder, or at least not move around as much and the result had been weird half-dreams she kept falling into and out of like the tide. Now, at eight in the morning, she is groggy and in a foul mood and dreads to go back to the museum. She takes extra long taking her shower, thanking her friend’s schedules for getting them out of the house earlier, so she has the bathroom all to herself and doesn’t have to hurry. She brushes her teeth three times, until she feels like she can’t taste alcohol and stale smoke on her tongue anymore and dresses in leggings and an oversized shirt. She won’t even change out of this once she gets to MoMa, just shrug her jacket and shoes, climb into that wretched bed and disappear into the mattress, Kylo Ren be damned.

 

The commute takes ages but is somehow still too short and Rey buys a soda on her way just to keep from getting there. The streets are busier now and the recent heat wave takes its toll on the people out and about, they’re either slow or irritable–or maybe that’s just Rey projecting because she is both slow _and_ irritable. At the employee-entrance, Rey flashes the temporary badge she’d gotten to the guard and makes her way through the administrative part of the complex on dragging feet to finally reach Special Exhibitions. The door to the control room is open and she sees Hux bent over the console, switching switches and looking bored. 

“Hello there,” he says when he sees her to which she smiles politely, getting into the confined space with him and wiggles out of her jeans jacket and trainers. She’s just putting them into a corner when Kylo walks in, looking like a million bucks, about ten years younger than the day before and grinning like the sun shines right out of his arse. He doesn’t acknowledge her outright, just pushes past Hux and waves a victory sign in passing before heading straight into the aquarium. Rey can’t suppress the urge to roll her eyes and scoffs.

“He’s a jackass, huh?” Hux says, his voice nasal and somehow unpleasant.

“Tell me about it,” Rey breathes and attempts to follow Kylo into the room. 

Except she can’t, because Hux is blocking the tiny path there and he doesn’t seem to want to move at all. She looks at him but he’s either not paying attention or is pretending not to be paying attention. Rey breathes out and pushes past him, brushing against his front with her back. Just when they’re bodies are flush together, he says: “So, do you wanna have a beer with me tonight?”

 _What the hell? Has everybody just lost their minds around here_ , she wonders and damn well leaps away from him.

“No, sorrry,” she says, without looking at him. “Really busy after work.” And then ducks into the fish tank and almost crashes into Kylo. He doesn’t seem to want to get out of her way either.

 

“Good morning, sunshine,” he says cheerily and cackles. “Guess we gotta be careful Hux doesn’t weasel in here while we’re sleeping.”

Apparently he’d heard the ginger's come-on. “You’re hilarious.” She shoves past him and throws her tote bag behind the bed to hide it from view and sulks quietly.

“So...not a morning person, I take it,” Kylo says, an annoying sing-sang in his voice that tells her that he is one, apparently.

“Not a morning-with-you person,” she sighs under her breath. What is up with him? She doesn’t believe for a second that he is trying to play nice with her after the hostile awkwardness of the day before, so what is his deal? Is he trying to trick her somehow?

“Harsh,” he says and dramatically bangs his hand on his chest as if she’s crushed his heart.

“What – do you want to be friends now?” Rey asks, walking to the bed with her forehead setting into a frown she thinks might stay there for the rest of the day. “You didn’t seem interested in that at all yesterday.”

“Well, it’s a new day and I’m bored,” he shrugs and then gives her a shit-eating grin like she should feel honoured or something.

“I don’t care,” Rey assures him, as sarcastic as he is irritating.

“Fine,” Kylo says. “No talking then.”

“Great.” Rey climbs into bed, hoping that this was the last of his weirdness. But, of course, she isn’t that lucky.

“Great,” he parrots as the first people enter the hall and come closer with interest. Rey can see some of them take out their phones from the corner of her eye, expecting some action by the looks of it. They’re not supposed to film or take pictures but who cares about those kinds of rules anyway these days? Then the little mob outside their window grows several folks larger when at least six young women huddle together close to the glass as if they were giving out free handbags from there. Rey can’t keep from shooting them a quick glance to satisfy their own curiosity and pauses for a second when she realises that on of them is pressing a sheet of paper against the pane.

“We wanna go to bed with you, too, Kylo!” it says and Rey’s gaze flickers to him, then at the paper again and then away. This is a mad house.

 _Please be quiet,_ she thinks at Kylo, hoping against hope that he’ll focus on his performance for his groupies now instead of being a pest to her fro the rest of the morning. Maybe flex his muscles for the girls gawking at him or something. He doesn’t. 

“Fans, you know how they get,” he says, voice dripping with arrogance and it’s so over the top, Rey isn’t sure, if maybe he's kidding. It wouldn’t surprise her though if he was dead serious. Still, he merely awards them a short nod, to which squeals erupt. Rey can’t hear them through the soundproof glass but sees it on the edge of her vision, the women a bouncing, flittering mass there. Obviously paying no further mind to them, Kylo turns his attention back on Rey.

“Coffee? With cream and two sugars, right?” She watches his tall frame close the space between the door and the small table in the corner with one step and fiddle with the french press on it.

“You’re still talking,” Rey says and pulls the comforter over her legs. She isn’t cold but somehow she has the wild hope that the fabric will keep the annoying away for a while.

Plus she feels the attention from Kylo’s huddle of fan girls drift to her, feel their eyes on her, turning to scrutiny, possibly judgement. They’re jealous of her, maybe. They don’t know they got no reason to because Rey would rather be dead than be Kylo’s girlfriend. None the wiser, these girls must have believed the papers when they ran their segments about the Broadway star turned living art and his new, previously unknown partner. Funny enough that given this, they were still holding that bed-sharing request up for him. If Kylo actually _had_ been hers, Rey would have had a couple of other things to say to this kind of behaviour. Being that he isn’t and she never wants him to be, she couldn’t care less, so it’s a mere irksome thing to note.

 

“Do you want coffee or not,” Kylo asks her then, impatiently, his voice just a tiny bit sharper than before. Rey wonders if she likes him better pissed off or smugly chipper. “I’m not getting back up again.”

“Yes,” she grumbles, because the coffee smells wonderful and she could really use it after the horrible night she’s had.

“Yes, what?” He asks, craning his head into an awkward angle to look at her while he scolds her manners.

“Yes, _please_ ,” she corrects exasperatedly. “God!”

“I told you, Kylo is just fine. No need to call me God.”

“Seriously, are you trying to get me to kill you in front of these people?” She gestures vaguely at the window. “ That wasn’t even a good joke.”

“ _You’re_ not even a good joke,” he dead-pans and it takes all she has not to jump out of bed, walk over to him and smack him on the chin.

“I swear, I’m going to strangle you with my bare hands if you don’t cut it out.”

“I swear, I’m going to strangle you with my bare hands if you don’t cut it out,” he repeats. Like a child.

“Oh my god, how old are you?” This is ridiculous.

“Thirty-two. How old are you?”

“Beside the point,” her voice is wavering with fading patience. “You’re too old to be this annoying.”

Kylo turns, two steaming cups of coffee in hand and leisurely walks over to her, smiling fondly for the benefit of the spectators and passes her the one with the cream before sitting down. His damn sweatpants take her attention away from being pissed for just a second there as he adjusts his position and sits back against the headboard. He doesn’t look anything like an underwear model face-wise, but damn if his body isn’t made of it. Even through the cotton shirt, she can tell he’s shredded.

“And you’re too young to be this little fun,” he says and brings her back to rightfully hating his guts, rather than admiring their packaging.

“I don’t know how you got the impression that I was here for your entertainment,” she scoffs.

“You’re right. You’re here to mack on me,” he grins. It takes her a second to process that. The last time she had a conversation this silly, she’d been in middle school, probably.

“Who even says that anymore?” She’s positively dumbfounded.

“I do,” he shrugs. “Wanna make out? I think our audience would like it. Or upset them, either way, wouldn’t it be fun to find out?”

“Go to hell,” she tells him, smiling sweetly. Even though a part of her would like to get the girls outside back for staring at her like she’s maybe a war criminal but having Kylo’s tongue shoved down her throat for that, especially with his attitude about it, seems a bit drastic.

“This is awesome,” he says and she can only assume he means their useless bickering.

“No, it’s not,” she says. “Leave me alone. I want to sleep.” Rey turns over, brings the blanket up higher and tries to drown him out with the plush feathers.

“Excellent idea,” Kylo nods and then scoops in behind, molding his body around her into a now familiar position. It’s still astonishing how long his arms are and so strong, they easily navigate her against his chest, encasing her in warmth. She wishes she could shake him off but once he’s around her like that, her body clicks into his with unfortunate ease, like the traitor thing was made to lie there surrounded by him. Like a russian doll. Physically, it's sickeningly comfortable and that’s actually worse than if it weren’t so.

“I loathe you,” she whispers as he snuggles his head against hers. Outside, Rey can see a row of hands tighten in shock around the wooden rail separating spectators from glass pane by about 20 centimetres. That’s almost worth having Kylo breathe down her neck.

“I loathe you too, sweetheart,” he purrs–and then, after leaning in further, he asks: “Were you drinking last night?”

“No?” She shoots back, suddenly mortified.

“Yes you were, you smell like…,” she can hear him trying to place it and pathetically tries to scooth away from him when he gets impossibly closer to smell her breath. “stale wine.”

She says nothing and tries to hold her breath. He cheats, because he tickles her, the hand around her stomach attacking her flesh with wiggling fingers. She jerks in his arms, her bum connecting firmly with his front and it’s the most ridiculous thing that it’s the second time that day she feels a dick pushed against her arse. 

“And cigarettes,” Kylo says, like he hasn’t noticed but pulls his pelvis back and away from her marginally at the same time. Rey groans, now embarrassed about her breath. Not that she cares if he thinks she stinks. But she doesn’t wanna stink anyway.

“Is it really bad?” She asks quietly after a moment.

“No,” Kylo says and it sounds sincere and it must be, because he nuzzles closer again. “I like my bedfellows on the partying side. So you smelling like booze and cigs is just fine.”

“Ugh,” she says, turning her head into the pillow. “Just let me sleep for a while, okay? I can’t deal with you right now.”

Maybe he’s tiring of wearing her patience thin, or maybe he just has mercy on her, because after what seems to be a moment of deliberation, he leaves her in peace. And, curse him, in his frustratingly comfortable embrace, she falls asleep quicker than she likes.

 

Rey wakes up from off-beat, resonating thuds somewhere close, her hair in her eyes because she must’ve lost her hair-tie in the crease of Kylo’s elbow. She needs a second to remember where she is. Prying her eyes open wearily, at a row of feet outside of the glass cone into focus. Every head suddenly turns to her, mostly because Kylo is lying behind her, pretty much out of sight and doesn't lend himself well as a target of curious eyes.

“Did someone seriously just knock against the window?” She asks into the silence and Kylo stirs slightly.

“Yup,” he mumbles into her neck.

“Day two and we’re officially zoo animals,” she glares at the supposed source of the knocking. It’s not Kylo’s fangirls anymore, but a couple of youths, who she supposes think they’re super funny.

“Quit looking at them, you know we’re not supposed to,” Kylo says and turns her around to him. 

She protests this by flailing and hitting his arms away, if careful to do it with her back to the spectators. She sits up once she’s free and he mirrors her, a glint in his eye.

“What’s up with your hair?” She asks him before he can be annoying again.

“It does that sometimes,” he says after checking his reflection in one of the picture frames. He runs a hand casually through the pitch black mess and for some ungodly reason, it works. He looks like he’s come straight from the hairdressers. And something else is different, too. She hadn’t noticed until now.

“You shaved your beard,” she states, realising that’s why he’d seemed so much younger this morning. Well, the missing beard and his pre-schooler antics both played equal parts in that, she figures.

“For the kissing,” he informs her. “Didn’t know how you liked it.”

“With you?” She quips an eyebrow because _this again, really?_ “Not at all.”

“Come on, are you really not gonna kiss me?” He tilts his head and then play-acts thinking, perfect with his hand stroking his chin pensively. “I’m pretty sure it’s in your contract.”

“Will you give it a rest?” She huffs. “This is bordering on sexual harassment, you know?”

“I’m just questioning your dedication to this piece of art, is all,” he says nonchalantly. 

“Why do you want to kiss me so bad, anyway?” Rey brings her own hand to her chin in a mockery of his stupid _everything_. “You know you could’ve done that two years ago every night for an 18 month-run if you hadn’t kicked me out of that audition.”

 

Kylo takes a moment to make sense of what she said but when the coin drops, his expression changes into one closer to his actual age. “You were crap at fencing. The whole part rode on that.”

“Bullshit,” Rey exclaims, switching into seriousness right along with him. “The part rode on the acting, on that amazing dialogue and I had that down, you know I did.”

“You were too young,” he says resolutely and shifts away from her a little. “You needed time.”

“Oh, and you got to be the one to decide that?” She asks incredulously, turning fully towards him and sitting crosslegged, her back now turned to the gawkers on the other side of the glass. They didn’t get to see her for this. This was potentially going to be crushing and she’d rather not have anybody watch. It wasn’t that she didn’t think she was talented, that wasn’t it. But one can’t get no after no after no and not let it get to one even a little bit.

“Matter of fact, yeah,” Kylo says and folds his giant limbs into a cross-legged position as well, towering over her even like this, “I did get to decide that.”

“And why?”

“Because I wrote the damn thing,” he replies. And that’s such bullshit, she almost laughs.

“No, you didn’t,” she states.

“Yes, I did,” he seems just as sure as her.

“Benjamin C. Solo wrote it,” she says, pursing her lips to turn her face into an “I told you so.”

“Hello?” Kylo waves his hands around, circling his face, then points at himself with two index fingers: “Ben?”

“No!” He can’t be serious. He says nothing, just looks at her like she’s possibly insane, or daft, or insanely daft.

“Why would you keep it a secret?” She asks, raking her brain for some forgotten knowledge of the fact. "If that _was_ you?"

“I told you my name yesterday,” he says, brows knitted together and then he turns his palms up into a shrug. “You were too busy to wish the plague upon me to notice.”

Then Rey remembers. He’s right, he had said it. 'Ben Solo is dead' were his exact words. Evidently, he is also right about how she'd been too pissed at him to process it.

“You said you were dead,” she says. “That Ben was dead.”

“He is,” Kylo says. “I’m just using his name when I’m writing.”

“That’s insane.”

“It’s freedom,” he says.

“You’re schizophrenic,” Rey decides.

“Potentially.”

“Why did Ben Solo die?”

“None of your business,” it sounds just like the rest of their back and forth but Rey sees his jaw tighten and knows that line of questioning is over for her.

Pompous douchebag, trying to be mysterious, is he? “Fine,” she’s not going to give him the satisfaction of prying.

“Great,” he says and then there’s silence for a while.

“It’s a wonderful play,” she says eventually when the silence stretches too taut. And also because it’s true.

“Thank you,” he replies toneless after a moment and they sit in silence again, neither of them really knowing what to make of the fact that this had been the first kind thing to ever pass between them. 

Rey doesn’t like it, it leaves her oddly untethered and she has a feeling that that’s a dangerous way to be around him. So she thinks about something to be mad about again. And doesn’t have to look far. She huffs out some air.

“What?” He asks, more curious than apprehensive.

“The fact that you wrote it makes it so much worse that you had me thrown out of that audition,” she tells him. “Before I thought you were just a prick, now I feel offended.”

“Because you weren’t right for the part?”

“Because you believed I wasn’t, yeah,” she says, setting that right.

“You weren’t ready,” he says again and it gnaws at her that he might be right.

She feels challenged all the same and a switch in her head turns to competitive. And even if the audition had been five years ago, Rey would still remember her lines–because damn, she’d loved them, breathed them and felt them, like few other things she had done before or since. Sometimes she would just say those lines to herself while scrubbing the floor or doing the dishes or some other mundane thing. That will show him, she’s sure. Not only that she still knows all of it by heart after such a long time but also the fact that she has done it so much since that she can deliver it near perfectly.

 

“What now, Jim?” She asks and grabs a fistful of his shirt, leaning in. Kylo looks at her adorably befuddled for a moment until he realises what she is doing. He leans into her grip then and watches her intently as she goes on quoting his play back to him. “Tell me what you’re going to do now? Because I know what I’m doing! I know the way. I figured this all out so long ago but I’ll be damned if I’ll drag you along.” She let’s go of his shirt in order to have that hand free to stab passionately against his pecks for the following. “You have to make that decision, you have to reach inside and drag out that gall out of your pitiful, hollow chest. I won’t do that for you, I refuse.” She stops, having talked herself into a rage, pauses and looks at him with all the vulnerability she can muster, her voice a broken, little thing: “I’ve given you too much already. I won’t put my breath in your lungs and suffocate so that you can go on another day pretending that none of this matters.”

Rey looks at him, ready to leave it at that but to her surprise, Kylo looks enthralled and his lips quiver in a way she feels in her bones is deliberate–she’s seen this before. This is his Jim-look, the way he had acted that part on stage two years ago. He is playing along with her. If she had not been sure of it, she would be now that he gently puts a warm, giant hand softly on her cheek. She feels its callouses and gentle pressure and has to keep herself actively from leaning into it. Damn him and his comfortable body. Kylo looks at her, or better, Jim looks at her like she hangs the moon every night and gingerly tucks a strand of hair behind her left ear, making her swallow involuntarily and the air sizzle with electricity Rey hadn’t known was there before.

“I never said it didn’t matter,” he breathes, looking straight at her lips and then back into her eyes again. 

 

It’s quite fascinating to see him practicing his craft from this close. She can see all the little micro expressions he’s conjuring up and knows it’s all planned, yet all felt. Just annoyingly impressive. And also, no matter what had transpired between them before, he’s generous now. She knows she could dive in there and finish this scene with him, he’d lift her up and they’d ride the wave together. It feels real, like he really thinks she is the most wonderful creature in the world. 

“It all matters,” he continues. “Too much, Cathy, it all matters too much.” And as per script, he leans in slowly, to kiss her, and Rey deliberates letting him do it for a second, but then her pride gets in the way and she shoves her palm into his face, fingers splayed over his brows just as his round lips part to envelop hers.

“Sucker,” she says and pushes him away.

She can’t see what he does behind her digits and because she’s curious (and it’s weird to have his face squished under her hand), she let’s him go. He meets her eyes with his in slits but the edges of his mouth quiver, as if he’s trying not to laugh.

“You weren’t ready then,” he says and it’s with a faint smile that he continues: “Maybe now you are.”

“Screw you,” she answers but she might be smiling a little as well. “I know I’m ready. I’m _terrific_.”

He just looks at her for a while and then sinks down onto the mattress, breaking the gaze only when he reaches out for her. Without a word, he pulls her down with him until she’s splayed across his chest with her head tucked unter his chin. This conversation seems to have run its course.

“You’re still an abysmal fencer,” Kylo says after a moment, his chest rumbling with lis tremulous bass underneath her cheek as he talks.

“Fuck you, Solo,” she says but without real malice.

“Stop calling me that,” his voice gains a tiny edge again but there’s less fervour in it than before. Rey could argue now but she doesn’t want his body to get all tense with apprehension. If it gets all tense, she can’t take the nap she wants and she wants it bad.

 

She wakes back up to the mouth-watering smell of sushi and sits up like a jolt, coming out dizzy but hungry and sees Kylo carrying a little breakfast-in-bed-table to her, stacked with a take-out variety of maki, delicious-looking fried roles stuffed with avocado and what appears to be chicken, tuna inside-out roles with cucumber and salmon nigiri.

“I thought you’d be into that,” he nods to himself and joins her. 

She already has her mouth full with a maki, so she can’t answer, at least not in any dignified way. They eat in amicable silence and Rey scans her feelings to determine how she feels about him, trying to cast aside the fact that he got her sushi, which is very likely an outlier and should not be counted. She comes up unsure. On one hand, he’s still an irritating and pompous douche but on the other the day had not been as bad as it could have been. And in a weird way, his antics had provided an odd kind of entertainment. At times, she must admit, she had been something akin to amused. Even the urge to smile had tucked at her one off moment or the other. Plus, he is admittedly very comfortable to sleep on and she wonders if that’s maybe the entire reason to her confusion. Rey remembers faintly one or the other article she read a while ago about, what were they called–bonding hormones? How they were supposed to flood the human body when said human body cuddles with another? She wonders if that has happened to her, if that is happening to her right now and with a bit of spite, she wants to immediately deny this. She’s not bonding with Kylo Ren. He’s an arse. But…she is willing to admit that she mellowed a bit. Somewhere between the nap and stuffing her face with the sushi he'd ordered (because he thought she would like it, no less), she went from loathing him to not hating every minute in his presence. That is it. That is all there is to it. Rey will not be betrayed by some cuddle hormone, she’ll just focus on her lunch and remind herself periodically that Kylo cost her an amazing role in an amazing play (and it makes no matter that he’d written it _at all, not like that’s in any way kind of amazing, no-oh_ ) and that he is generally rather unpleasant, mostly.

Still, Kylo lets her munch down way more than her share of food and when she says he should eat something too, he just waves a hand vaguely in her direction, as in ‘You go ahead’ and fiddles with the laptop they’ve been given to put on an episode for them to watch. It’s the one he'd been wanting to see all day yesterday and she’d vetoed every single time, so that helps. He’s obviously still an egotistical maniac with no concern for the wellbeing of others. Obviously.

“Just one episode of this, alright?” He points to the screen. “Then we can go back to watching your crap shows.”

Rey says nothing and tries very hard not to smile. When that fails, she just reaches for more sushi to occupy her mouth.

 

After lunch, Rey is drowsy from digesting and requests a coke and a bathroom break. When she gets back, Kylo is reading a book and is not deterred from it when she climbs back into bed to him. He hardly stirs for the next hour and Rey, along with the dwindling crowd in front of their little fish tank, gets increasingly bored. Only that the gawkers can leave at any time. Rey can’t. Once they’ve gone without anybody watching them in a solid three minutes, Rey decides it’s okay to demand some attention from him. After all, they are supposed to be interacting for this performance to be interesting.

“What are you reading?” She asks and sits up to be level with him.

“Science-Fiction Thriller,” he replies after a moment, not looking up from the page. “It’s slightly jumbled but I can’t put it down.”

“Put it down,” she orders.

“Why?” He’s still reading.

“I’m bored,” she tells him true.

“You didn’t care when _I_ was bored this morning,” with that she gets a sideway glance and a raised eyebrow before he gets right back to his book.

“Fine,” she says.

“Great,” he says.

“What is it about?”

Kylo lets out a highly unwarranted laboured breath and holds out the back cover for her to read the summary. It’s about a cold war between Earth and Mars and a conspiracy and a missing girl on a space station or something, and civil unrest in the Belt, whatever that was. 

“I think it sounds interesting,” she says. “What are the characters like?”

“Rey, I’m reading.” Kylo snaps the book away from her and is lost to the world again.

It’s no use. Rey groans and sinks back down on her back to stare at the steel construction that holds their ceiling. An elderly couple has come to watch them but after a while, they too get bored and move on to look at the bronze waves. Rey turns to the side and counts the feet that pass their window.

 

After 127 pairs of mostly a variety of summer sandals and trainers, Rey is startled by the sound of a hardcover book hitting the floor with a thud. It appears Kylo is done for now. She looks up to him to find he’s already looking at her, his eyes slits as if he’s gauging something.

“I could give you a massage,” he says and she’s at once amused, befuddled and slightly weirded out. 

“I’m not gonna make out with you,” she says, just in case that’s what he’s playing at here.

“I’m not asking you to,” Kylo rolls his eyes dramatically. “You said you were bored. I’ve read enough for now. So...there’s a suggestion. If it makes you feel any better, you can reciprocate. The good old five-minute-switcheroo.”

The good old _what now?_

“I can’t believe you have both the soul of a tattered grandpa and the one of a twelve year old kid in that freakishly tall body of yours. What even is that word?”

“Do you want a massage?” Suddenly he’s all impatient again–who could even hope to puzzle out this strange, strange man? 

“Yes,” she answers when he won’t stop piercing her with his eyes, bullying her to answer. And because she would actually like a massage. Even if it might be weird coming from him. Then again, they have been awfully un-couply the last couple of hours and Rey feels like she’s not doing her job right. So maybe this will deliver and get some people interested in their little Big Brother show.

“Turn around,” Kylo commands.

She’d rather not. “I can sit up too.”

“Nope, we’re doing this right,” he decides this and she doesn’t like it. With half a mind to tell him as much, she stops in her tracks when he continues: “I mean it just works better that way, you’re so tiny, we’d just sit so awkwardly. But if you wanna sit, sit.”

She eyes him for a moment, considers and then shrugs. Now that he’s left her the option, she is fine with turning to her stomach. She even rolls up her shirt, all on her own. If this surprises Kylo or cause any reaction at all, he doesn’t show it. Instead, she can hear him rub his hands together quickly so they are less cold and then he puts his hands on her shoulders, still cold but not unpleasantly so.

He must be hunched over her when he starts, sitting on his knees on her right side. She can feel him hover, body heat radiating unto her bare back. She’s wearing a bralette underneath her bunched up shirt but the fabric is so thin, she hardly feels it. When Kylo starts kneading her flesh, she is instantly surprised at how precisely he rides the line between hard enough to make an impression and light enough to have it still be pleasurable. And pleasurable it is.

He’s disturbingly good at this, mapping out her back with just two broad strokes of his huge hands, palms smoothing out her skin all the way down to the small of her back and she can’t help the goosebumps at all as they trickle down her spine and spread from there to her fingertips and the ends of her toes. He runs his hands back up again, devotes a long while to the tension between her shoulder blades and then works up long fingers towards her neck. When she moans quietly, it’s completely out of her control. Rey is momentarily mortified but save for his hands pausing the fragment of a second, Kylo gives no indication of caring about the borderline lewd sound she’s just heard herself make and keeps going. The next couple of moans, Rey successfully dials down to somewhat heavier breathing. Then suddenly, it ends. He stops his ministrations and smoothes out her back one more time before leaning away. The absence of his body above her makes Rey shiver from the sudden chill that's touching her back instead of his hands now.

 

“So. Your turn,” Kylo says and it takes Rey a shameful while to gather back her wits and pay him back in kind. 

Which, for the record, she does. Let it not be said that Rey Kenobi doesn’t give a killer massage. Kylo, for reasons of propriety or because he doesn’t want her touching his bare skin, leaves his shirt on but Rey can work with that as well. It takes her a little more effort to cover the entirety of his broad back but she works hard on it, finding the firm spots there and working them one at after the other. He hums at times and winces at others but he seems to enjoy it. His flesh is warm underneath her fingers and when she works at his neck, she can feel his pulse quick and heavy. The only annoying thing is that Rey really can’t use her hands as efficiently as she could, sitting the beside him the way she does, so after a while of that, she decides it’s no use and moves on a quick idea; swinging her hips over his body so she can sit on his ass. Or so had been the plan.

As soon as her weight hits him, and way quicker than she could have anticipated, he bucks up, at the same time reaches around and catches her as she tumbles sideways in surprise and shoves her underneath his frame in one swift movement. It’s too much to process as it happens but Rey is dimly aware that he is following some sort of self-defence combination. She breathes hard, eyes wide in shock when he comes to a halt above her, hair falling into his eyes and nails digging into her wrists which he’s pushing down into the mattress at either side of her face.

_What just happened?_

It seems he doesn’t know either, because a second later his stern face becomes puzzled, as if he just snapped out of autopilot and the pressure on her wrists fades. He still hovers over her tough, his legs pinning hers in place under him.

“Sorry,” he says when it computes what he did, “you startled me.”

“Didn’t mean to,” she whispers and stares at him. 

She isn’t scared, funny enough, mostly because she’s distracted by the way he looms over her with dark eyes and softly parted lips and there is that energy between them again, that electricity. Rey knows they are instantly both keenly and equally aware of it. For the first time, she considers _considering_ to kiss him. She thinks he might be considering to ask her again if she would.

 

“We got your dinner,” bursts the intercom and shatters the moment.

In the next, Kylo has already climbed down from her like a shot and the electricity dwindles down to a low buzz. It’s still there and now she’s aware of it, she is bound to notice it going forward, swinging along among all things. Rey opts to try and drown that out with the sandwiches she hurries to get from Hux in the control room. As Kylo and her eat she wonders what on earth happened to Kylo to make him this jumpy about un-anticipated touching.

To get over the slight awkwardness that still lingers, Rey puts on another episode, another of the annoying show he likes because she has somewhat of a guilty conscience to have startled him. After, he reads her a bit from his book which goes to show that he can't be too angry at her for the spook. They don’t bicker much for the rest of the day but they don’t talk about why Kylo body slammed Rey martial-arts-style for attempting to sit on his behind either. Something that quirks her curiosity to frustrating levels. 

He doesn't care to tell her about it and doesn't change his mind until it's time to leave. Kylo leads Rey out of the room when they say goodnight to Hux. Her lanky bed-mate shoots the red-head a glare Rey would interpret as “Hands off”, which is uncalled for because she can as well handle herself but kind of sweet all the same. Outside the employee’s entrance, the summer evening is bright and warm and the humidity has dropped just enough to be bearable. Rey is happy to be out. Kylo is somehow solemn.

 

“I’m sorry for jumping on you, it was an…unfortunate reflex,” Kylo says eventually and sounds very sincere and slightly embarrassed. “And I’m sorry for being a jerk to you at that audtition.”

“And being a jerk yesterday?” She supplies because she likes the sound of that. She’ll hear an apology from him any day.

“And yesterday,” he concedes.

“And this morning?”

“And this morning,” he agrees as well. “Except I’d like to think I was just lightening up the mood.”

“Alright,” Rey nods. Whatever he says. 

“We should try to get along, don’t you think?” Kylo asks into a sudden silence, scratching the back of his head as if still deliberating his own proposal, as if he wasn’t sure they really _should_ try to get along. “It’s gonna be a long week, I’d rather not spend it fighting all day.”

Rey could theoretically roll with his crazy idea. “As long as you’re not being an arrogant arse-hat we should be fine.”

“As long as you’ll try to not look at me like I’m the dirt under your shoe, that should be doable,” he says and Rey pauses.

“I never did that,” she blurts.

“Yes you did,” Kylo says in a voice that really doesn’t allow for arguing.

“No I-,” she argues anyway but is cut short. 

Quicker than Rey could have registered, let alone duck out of the way, Kylo has snapped down to her and he kisses her quickly on the cheek. He speaks while moving back out and his breath hits Rey’s cheek all warm and strangely familiar.

“Let’s not argue,” he says. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

And with that, he turns around on his heel and walks, leaving Rey with eyes wide and face contorted into an error message. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments and kudos make the writers hearts sing and fingers type faster!


	3. DAY THREE

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> People, you know the drill! 
> 
> I got this chapter out by the skin of my teeth because I won't have much time to write next week and it's crazy late right now and I have work in the morning..yada yada yada.  
> Long story short: No beta, there will be mistakes, you will find them and hopefully correct them in your head and know what I'm trying to say until I have the time to properly edit.
> 
> Please bare with me and I hope you enjoy!

Day three starts better than the first two. At least Rey gets out of bed easier. She gets dressed wedged in between her dresser and Finn’s bed, his entire body wrapped in a cocoon of blankets. He’s got his one off day of the week and she’s pretty sure he won’t get up until noon, because he has the habit of hitting the clubs with his friends after the Tuesday show. Still, her best friend surprises her by joining her at the breakfast table, bleary-eyed but in a cheerful mood.

“You’re up early,” she notes, taking in his rumpled shirt atop age old shorts and he yawns an affirmation.

“I’m going right back,” he says but sits down anyway. “Just wanted to check in with you. So, tell me peanut, how’s it going with your art project? That Kylo guy still bothering you?”

Rey waves her spoon around a little before she answers in lieu of a shrug and then plays with the cornflakes in her bowl. “He’s just annoying, mostly. But yesterday wasn’t so bad.”

“D’you have to make out with him yet?” Finn asks and she glares at him.

“No.”

“Are you gonna?” He flashes her a grin, his teeth straight and white and made for toothpaste commercials.

“You sound just like him,” Rey groans. “Why is everyone so obsessed about whether we kiss or not?”

“For the story to tell after,” he tells her. “That’s the only reason.”

“Well, I don’t know yet,” she says because it’s true. She isn’t completely opposed to it after finding out the day before that he isn’t as big an arse as she’d thought on Monday but still. Anyway, she would rather not discuss this in too much detail before her first coffee, so she changes the subject. “I didn’t tell you yet: that great play I auditioned for with him? He wrote it.”

“Seriously?” Finn’s eyes go wide in sincere surprise and she nods. “That’s a fucking neat play. Boy, sucks so much more that he got you kicked out then.”

“I know, right?” Rey huffs. “That’s what I said.”

They talk some more but it’s evident that Finn is still half-asleep, so after promising to give him all the details later that night, she sends him back to bed. He’s snoring by the time she pulls the door closed after her.

 

The commute is less time-consuming that morning and she’s out of the subway a good ten minutes earlier than usual, when her phone vibrates in her pocket, the screen lighting up with Kaydel’s unimpressed caller ID picture.

“I’m sure you checked out your twitter mentions today?” Her agent says instead of ‘hello’.

“Um, no,” Rey answers, working her headphones into the mobile and then into her ears to have her hands free. “Should I have?”

“Yup,” Kaydel says merely and Rey rolls her eyes, glad that this isn’t a face time call.

“What do they say?” She asks somewhat impatiently.

“Mostly wild speculation about your _boyfriend_ being either violent or kinky.”

“I’m not following?” Rey truly isn’t.

Kaydel takes a deep dramatic breath and apparently starts reading a tweet: “‘Is at-RealKyloRen getting off on rough sex or did at-NobiRey just say the wrong thing, questionmark, hashtag ninjamove, hashtag kinky’. And then there’s a video of him flipping you around on the bed. And that video went semi-viral.”

“Shit,” Rey says, remembering the slightly strange moment when Kylo had tackled her after her attempt massage and thinks for the first time about how that must’ve looked to any spectator watching from the outside.

“So, what’s going on there?” Kaydel asks, although she doesn’t sound scandalised or even remotely interested, she just wants the facts so she knows them.

“Nothing, I just spooked him, is all.” Rey rounds the corner to the museum, a soft breeze blowing her loose curls out of her face. “He was startled and moved on reflex. He didn’t hurt me at all.”

“So, should I comment on it?” If possible, Kay sounds even less interested than before.

“Yeah?” Rey isn’t sure at all, she never had to deal with anything like that before. Hell, she hardly ever had any twitter mentions of note in New York at all, and never ones like that in the UK either. “I guess, just pick a tweet a little less crass to reply to and say, I don’t know: ‘Just having some fun, we like to wrestle’ Winky face.”

“Hashtag ‘Get you a man who can do both’?” Kaydel suggests.

“Sure, why not,” Rey says because it’s really all the same to her. She still doesn’t feel too great about pretending that she’s really Kylo’s girlfriend but she wouldn’t want any rumors to spread about him or their supposed relationship anyway.

“Fine, then. And keep an eye on those things will you?” Kaydel reprimands her softly. “We need you all up on this social media game.”

And with that, her agent hangs up. If there’s no time for hello, apparently there’s no time for goodbye either. Rey deliberates telling Kylo about that whole twitter business but when she arrives in the fish tank, he is already sprawled over the bed, fast asleep. Maybe, like Finn, he had partied the night before and is sleeping it off now. All the better for her. She doesn’t mind sleeping for a while and put off the inevitable bickering for a little while longer. The bed is nice and warm, heat radiating off of Kylo’s massive body as he slumbers and she curls herself into the little space he’s left her and drifts off to sleep before the first visitors of the day lay their eyes on them.

 

Rey wakes up to the strong scent of coffee and Kylo holding a steaming cup over her face. She blinks a few times, this time immediately aware of where she is and why she’s there and sits up to take the cup without comment.

“You snore like a sailor, by the way,” Kylo says and picks up a New York Times from his bedside table.

“Yes, I slept very well, thanks for asking,” she says.

He half-chuckles and then reads his paper. They have their coffee in silence and after a while, he passes her a small bowl of grapes and apple slices he must’ve kep at his side of the bed and they share the assorted fruits until Rey gets bored of that.

“Do you want to play _20 questions_?” She asks him and sits up straighter, ready for some action.

“As in the guessing game?” Kylo puts the newspaper away and turns to her. His beard has grown back into a five o’clock shadow, his hair is disheveled by his standards and the bags under his eyes are more pronounced than she remembers them from before. So he must’ve had a long night before. The fact that he seems to want to humor her despite that is charming in a way.

“No, as in...like...an interview,” she clarifies.

“You want to interview me?” He sounds both amused and sceptical.

“Might as well,” she shrugs easily. “Now that we decided to get along, we’ll have to do something else than bitch at each other all day–and it’s an awfully long time to be doing _nothing_.”

“We could make out,” he shrugs in turn. His answer is a stray throw pillow smacked into his face. “Okay, okay.” He concedes, voice muffled by the downs. “Let’s do it then. I’m ready,” he says when she withdraws the pillow.

“Great, here we go...um,” she starts and scrambles for the questions. She has an array of them, always at the ready because she finds that’s what helps her get comfortable and acquainted with new people. Something you rely on when you have to make connections quick with a new cast. The first weeks of rehearsing for a new play is not only getting the lines, the steps and the songs right, it’s also building a rapport with the people you work, getting a sense of who they are so you can believably portray familiarity or even intimacy with them on stage. She can pick them at random now and starts with what she deems an easy one. “What’s your life motto, or, like, a philosophy you live by?”

“Hm,” Kylo hums, sitting back against the headboard. “‘Don’t let a day go to waste’ I guess, I always wanna be doing something, because who knows how long I’ll get the chance to do anything at all.”

“What’s your favorite thing about yourself?” She asks after acknowledging his answer with an understanding nod.

“Next question.”

“No, come on,” she protests. “You have to answer. That’s the rules.”

“Physically or personality-wise?”

Rey considers this for a moment. “Both.”

“Physically not much,” he sighs. “I guess I like my elbows.”

“Your elbows?” She repeats stupidly. “What, that the most random body part you could think of?” He wiggles his head into something affirmative. “Okay, and about your personality?”

“I’m idealistic.” He doesn’t have to think on that long, obviously. “I value that in people, so I like it about myself.”

“Are you religious?”

“Not really,” he replies. “As far as beliefs go, I think that, like, every living being has this energy and that we connect with each other that way, I think it’s important for that energy to stay in balance, so I try to pay attention to my surroundings and be aware which way that force swings.”

“So you can balance it out?”

“That would be the idea, yeah.”

“What was the best time of your life?” That’s a more personal question and it comes at a place that Rey likes, just after you’ve asked some easy, basic ones. By that time in any of these games, people have started getting used to the process of answering questions, have most of the time gotten comfortable (and more often than not excited about) talking about themselves and thus it’s easier to start getting into the weightier stuff. Still Kylo ponders this long enough to worry Rey a bit about having misjudged her pace. He does answer her eventually but it comes out slower than before, like it’s taking time to peel out of his brain, as if the little anecdote was an onion and a precious one at that.

“When I was a kid, still very little,” he begins. “My parents took me on a trip to the alps. I don’t remember it in much detail but I know I was happy there. They were happy. It was...peaceful.”

“What was the worst thing that ever happened to you?” Rey asks, emboldened by his willingness to answer the question before.

“I…,” he starts, then stops and looks at her. “skip.” She catches his eyes, they look serious. “I might tell you one day. Just not like this.”

“Okay.” It’s important to respect people’s boundaries in games like these, even if curiosity is prickling under one’s skin. Not that it does for Rey now. It doesn’t. Not at all. “So, what’s your biggest dream?”

“To leave this place with a legacy.” That he gives away with more ease. Interesting.

“What did you want to be when you were a kid?”

“Magician.” Rey turns her head to look at him again and finds him smiling off into the distance somewhere, as if she just helped him unearth a happy memory.

“What is your biggest accomplishment?” She asks him, hoping to repeat that feat.

Kylo’s face changes subtly, his full lips tensing, then relaxing and eyes dancing from left to right and back as he ponders this. He settles on: “Writing that play.”

“Why do you think we’re all here?” It’s one of Rey’s favourite questions because at times it can turn into full fledged discussions about the meaning of life, a question there are so many answers to as there are people on the planet.

“That’s terribly philosophical for ten thirty in the morning,” Kylo notes. “I don’t know. Maybe to balance each other out. Because humans are the only thing that can save the world from humans. If that makes sense.”

“Yeah, it does,” she agrees. Kylo seems very big on balance. Rey decides to go for something personal again after the theoretical. “What was your best relationship so far?”

“Romantically?” He inquires and Rey nods. “None of them, to be honest. Some were less damaging than others but I wouldn’t call any among them ‘the best’.”

“If you could change one thing about the world, what would it be?” More theoretical stuff then, although she hardly hears his next answer because she’s still a little stuck on the previous one.

“More order, internally, I’d have people be less prone to chaos.” Maybe the internal chaos was the reason he hadn’t had a great relationship yet? She wonders if he ever wondered about that or if it only occurs to her listening to him talk.

“What do you do on your time off?” An easy question to keep the balance. He did have a point there, it was indeed better to combine the prying and the philosophical with a bit of the mundane. The potential dark with something light here and there.

“Reading. Writing. Drawing,” he lists easily. “And I like running every now and then.”

“If money was no object, what would you do in life?”

“The same I am now, probably, only I’d sleep more.”

Rey nods her agreement, that’s what she’d do too. It’s nice to talk to him like that. She’s not half as ill at ease about spending so much time with him as she had been the days before. Treating him like any new person she had to work with, she feels like she’s working off her animosity toward him bit by bit. Not that he ultimately deserved that–she still isn’t sure of that–but it makes the whole thing easier on her and isn’t that what’s essential for her. Kylo seems to be enjoying himself as well, at least he’s smiling now. She wonders how many interviews he has given in his days. With all that Broadway fame he’d seen, probably a few. Maybe hers isn’t the worst he ever sat through. Surely a man like him must very much like talking about himself. She doesn’t mind it.

 

“Have you ever broken someone’s heart?” It’s another personal one, another vaguely love-related one and Rey thinks she might limit those going forward. She doesn’t want to send the wrong message. Whatever that message would be.

“I don’t know. Maybe. Not knowingly,” he replies.

“What are you thankful for?”

“The fact that it’s so quiet in here.” He looks about the room and vaguely gestures around.

In spite of herself, Rey feels a little offended at the implication of his sarcasm. “Fine, I’ll stop talking…” He could’ve just told her, if he’d wanted it quiet.

“Wha- no!” He hurries to say. “I didn’t mean it like that. I don’t mind you,” he clarifies. “I genuinely like that we can’t hear anything from _outside_. It’s never this quiet in my apartment, I can think straight in here for once, put things in order in my head.”

“Yeah, okay, I get that,” she nods, appeased. “What do you wish people understood more about you?”

Kylo looks at her pointedly before answering, making her turn her face to his once again. “That most of the time when I’m being a jerk it’s got everything to do with me and not a lot with the people I’m being a jerk to.” Very interesting. So very interesting, it’s best to move on.

“If you could turn back time and do anything in your life differently, would you?”

“Yes.” He says, wholly unsatisfyingly.

“What specifically?” She prods.

“Many, many things.” It’s obvious he isn’t going to elaborate on that any further so Rey begrudgingly let’s it go.

“What’s the craziest, most exciting thing you’ve ever done?”

“This, probably,” he says. “Maybe not sky-diving-exciting but concept-wise–the being watched all the time of it all.”

“Yeah, me too,” she agrees and glances to the window for the first time in a long while. Funny how she hadn’t thought about that at all for the last couple of minutes. There’s a few people standing outside watching, she counts seven pairs of feet and briefly makes eye-contact with a little girl with her nose pressed to the glass. When the girl catches Rey’s eyes, she gets shy and hides behind what Rey takes to be her father’s jeans with a start.

“What did you dream about last night?” She asks Kylo, still smiling.

“You.”

“Oh.” _Oh._ “What did I do?”

“Nothing much, you were just there, japping and napping.”

“Excuse you,” she protests. “I don’t _jap_!”

He laughs, low and at ease and she can’t help the corners of her lips from twitching with the impulse to join in.

“Okay, that was it,” she declares. “At least I think that was twenty questions.”

 

“So, do you feel you’ve learned something substantially new about me?” He asks her, looking up from underneath heaps of unruly black hair that must’ve fallen into his face when he’d laughed.

“Hm. You’re far more reflected than you let on, I think,” she says. “I liked the thing about you being a jerk.”

He laughs at that again softly. “Well, it’s true.” He looks at her quizzically for a moment, as if considering something, then he opens his mouth again. “What was _your_ best relationship?”

“None,” she blurts out, honesty unfiltered and is then immediately embarrassed, because who hasn’t had a proper relationship by the age of twenty-three? So she hurries to elaborate, to _explain_ herself. “Um, I...I never really had one, per se. It just never worked out I guess because I was always in the theatre and when _I_ was old enough to be into dating, most of the boys I knew had already figured out _they_ weren’t into girls.”

“Oh, I remember now,” he says, obviously recalling her rep sheet she brought to her audition back in the day. “You were the West End kid.”

“Yup, started as Cosette, then I was in the ensemble for Annie, then Billy Elliot until I was really too old to pass for a fourteen-year-old ballerina and then went on to do other shows.”

“Sounds like you never had a proper childhood?” Kylo readjusts his position, wiggling lower on the bed until he can prop his arm on the bed and lounge on his side to look at her when she answers.

“You could say that, yeah,” sha says. “At least not in the traditional sense.”

“And your parents?” Kylo asks. “They supported that?”

“I wouldn’t know if they would have,” she replies. “They died in a car crash when I was five. I went to live with my grandfather and the only thing he said would make me smile, after they were gone, were acting and dance classes. He’s a professor so he was very busy most days and he ended up putting me in this, like, full time artsy school and from there I was picked for Cosette.”

Kylo looks at her for a while, brow furrowed in sudden discomfort. “I’m sorry about your parents.”

“Thank you,” she says and watches his face get back to normal. Good, he doesn’t take pity on her. She hates when people do that. She’s lived a good life with her grandpa, even if it hadn’t been ideal, at least she had always known she was loved and had never wanted for anything. “I’m okay now.” She smiles slightly and shifts the conversation to him still. “How was your childhood?”

“Similar,” he says and runs his free hand over his face, then scratching his head and pursing his lips before he goes on. Rey can sense another barrier there from experience, something he doesn’t easily share with people. “My parents were around when I was little but only barely. My Dad ran this big shipping company and was always travelling, sometimes months at a time and my Mom worked in the Senate in Washington. I was a weird kid, they never really knew what to do with me. But I liked theater, drawing and all that ‘creative mumbo jumbo’, as my father would call it, so they sent me to live with Luke. He was already big around here by then, taught art classes occasionally at the private academy they enrolled me in. Most of the time he was abroad somewhere for one or the other project though, took me along for some of them, but mostly I was on my own. I spent a lot of time in museums just waiting around for him. Girls weren’t really a thing until I was way into my twenties. I guess I never felt like I was all the way grown up because I was never all the way a kid, if that makes sense. It kind of all bled into each other and I thought, someday there’ll just be this distinct moment when I knew I was done growing. But I’m still waiting.”

“You’re never done growing,” Rey muses, thinking that this was the longest she has ever heard Kylo speak uninterruptedly and finding that she had liked it. It made some things fall into perspective about him too; the way he seemed so self-involved sometimes and so impatient with himself and others most of the time. If you always had to look out for yourself, you were prone to always look out for number one, if you spent most of your time growing up raising yourself essentially, you’d develop strange standards and higher expectations. A kid who grew up having to fend for himself would have also had a strong wish for order and balance, some stability to find on the inside if the outside would not provide it. It all makes sense.

“What do your parents think of your success now?” She asks, expecting a yes, because what parent wouldn’t relish in such a successful child. Surely talking about that would lift the spirits that seemed to have sunken in him. “Are they proud?”

“I’d like to imagine they would be,” Kylo says and Rey knows the simple conditional well enough from using it herself to talk about her parents to know she has just majorly put her foot in her mouth.

 

“My Dad died winter 2015,” Kylo says. “Mom died a year later, almost to the day.”

“Oh God, I’m so sorry, Kylo.” She’s mortified, remembering every instance this has happened to her and also remembers how he’d just reacted when he’d assumed her parents were alive. He had recovered quickly, so she should too. No pity. She thinks he will want that as well. She is trying to come up with some other thing to talk about when she continues, staring off into his own world as it seems.

“I wasn’t on great terms with either of them when they died. Or ever, really,” he says. “I hadn’t really spoken to my Dad for years before his accident–the last time was just a couple of days before, at some family function my girlfriend at the time bullied me to go to. We had words. Drastic ones. I think the last thing I ever said to him was that he was an old fool who could go fuck himself for all I care.”

Rey listens intently, with baited breath, afraid to take another and make any noise to distract him. At the same time, she’s worried he might hear how her heart breaks for him. Kylo goes on, undeterred.

“I got a little closer to my mother again after his funeral but it was election year and all the plans we made kept falling through. She had so many more important places to be. I was pretty pissed off after a while of that. Last time we spoke was over the phone before the opening night of Sweeney Todd. I was so nervous to do it because I’d never done musical before...I can’t really sing, you know?” He smiles a little at that, as if he’s hearing sing badly in his head and finds that amusing. Rey can’t help but lean in a little, enthralled by the tragedy of it all and at the same time deeply ashamed of the fact.

“So she’d always promised she’d be there and she’d cancelled on me all summer, always like ‘I’ll see you opening night, Ben, I promise’. Then she calls me one day before we open and tells me she can’t make it and I lost it. I yelled at her, like ‘I don’t want you here if you don’t wanna be here, you’ve never been here before, why start now?’ I just completely lost my shit on her. I brought up all this stuff from my childhood too, from shipping me off to Luke to not noticing that I’d been…,” he catches himself, like he’d almost just blurted out something he did not want to say but goes on too quickly for Rey to properly register it.

“That I had problems. I was all alone in this shit town and she never cared. It always seemed like she chose ‘America’ over me at every chance, like, I’m sorry I can’t be a morally-desolate-overpopulated-corrupt-overarmed-underinsured-capitalist-superpower,” he rambles, voice raised to full volume now, undoubtedly reliving what must have been a frightful conversation. “Sorry I’m just the overly sensitive, strange and messed up son you never wanted.”

Kylo breathes out and shakes his head to collect himself, like he just startled himself with his own near yelling and so when he goes on, he’s quieter. So quiet indeed that Rey has to lean in further. “I did opening night and when I came back to my dressing room, I had seven missed calls from the hospital.”

Rey manages not to put her hands on her mouth and gasp, but only just.

“My Mom had had a heart attack on the plane over to New York. She’d flown in to surprise me,” he reveals to a stunned Rey. “She was taken to surgery when we had our curtain call. She would’ve been there just on time to see the show.” Kylo pauses and swallows. He looks so much younger than his years now, like a little boy who is reliving the worst hours of his life and still can’t make sense of them at all. His voice is shaky and Rey’s heart is beating so fast from trying to keep itself together, it’s hard to breathe.

“I went straight over. She came out of surgery and they said it was critical but I just-” he’s struggling to find the words and his voice is so terribly close to cracking, his eyes glistening so dangerously wet. “I couldn’t believe she would be going anywhere. My Mom was like a battle axe, indestructible. She woke up, couldn’t speak, she just looked at me and I held her hand and I apologized a thousand times and told her to goddamn _stay_ , I don’t think she even heard me. She didn’t make it through the night. I’d fallen asleep holding her hand and when I woke up, it was...cold.”

That word hangs in there air between them for a moment and Rey can imagine the scene so vividly and so horribly, she can’t even begin to put words to how she feels for him, how she aches for him and with him. This might be the most heartbreaking thing she has ever heard. Meanwhile, Kylo puts himself back into order, smoothing out his hair, then his shirt and then sits up completely, lifting himself out of his lying position to fish for his bag beside the bag. Rey watches idly as he produces a piece of paper from his wallet and then holds it out to her.

“This was on her bedside with a cactus she’d meant to give me,” he–impossibly, tenderly–laughs a bit at the memory, which makes everything worse. “The fact that she’d get me a cactus for opening night instead of flowers is really all you need to know about my mother before you read this.”

Rey takes the letter on autopilot and hardly trusts herself to speak. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah,” Kylo nods, seemingly relaxed now. “Might as well have someone else to talk about this with. I never showed it to anyone except Luke and he’s annoyingly positive about everything.”

Rey eyes him hesitantly and finds something so raw and real beneath Kylo’s carefully crafted mask of composure, that she unfolds the letter, covered top to bottom with a slim, elegant hand.

 _Don’t leave me alone with this now_ , Kylo’s eyes are whispering as they bore into hers, fighting past his measured cool, _don’t leave me here now that you made me talk about it_.

So she doesn’t. And Rey reads.

 

_My dear Ben,_

_when you read this, I hope that you’ll have forgiven me, I hope it’s the morning after a tremendous opening night and we both have a splitting headache from celebrating your amazing performance together._

_I know you will have done splendidly, you always do. I know I haven’t been around nearly enough to appreciate your amazing gift, I am so sure you have neither your father nor me to thank for. Really, you don’t have much to thank us for in any case. Most of the things you said to me are true and I am very sorry for everything._

_There are no excuses but as a way of explanation let me just say that I was acting under the impression that I was doing the right thing in sending you to New York. I thought you’d be able to do everything that I could not make happen for you. And look, what wonderful career you’ve built all that into. I’m sorry so much of it grew out of frustration, insecurity and what you perceived as abandonment. I never meant for you to feel that way. I am so, so sorry, my son. My beloved, wonderful child. You have had a hard time with your cactus mother, I guess I always pricked you when you wanted to get close. I only ever wished to make you strong and independent but I failed to see that there is nothing wrong with hovering just a little bit ever so often._

_I vow to change that now. Starting today. I put in my resignation, Washington be damned. This country pledged itself to an orange moron-troll, let Capitol Hill deal with that without me. It’s long overdue that I focus on something that I hope still can be fixed; my relationship with you._

_I hope to make you as proud of me as I am of you, I hope to be there first row on every opening night to come, to witness you finally find a woman worthy of you, to help raise your children. Be there for them like I missed being there for you. And I hope beyond hope that you’ll forgive me and we can start over._

_Hi, I’m your Mom, and i’d like to try again._

_Love,_

_your Mama, Leia_

 

Carefully, gingerly, Rey folds the letter back together and puts it on the bedside table with shaky hands and wet cheeks. She can’t help the tears but she is resolved not to make a spectacle out of them. No pity. Just...understanding. That she can do.

“That’s why Ben Solo died,” she says. She understands that now.

“I changed my name because I thought I didn’t have parents,” Kylo says and glances off and only now does his voice break. “Now I don’t. They both died likely believing that I hated them, that I wanted nothing at all to do with them.”

“And now you don’t think you deserve their name.”

Kylo says nothing, he scarcely breathes.

“Oh, Kylo,” Rey can’t help it.

It’s not pity that drives her forward to hug him to her, to pull him down onto the mattress with her until his head is tucked under her chin for once, his body weighing down hers, it’s pain. She feels the agony writhing through her body as if it was his, imagining his grief so vividly that it becomes her own. She holds him tight and brings her hand up to stroke his scalp, running her fingers through his thick black hair. From the corner of her eye, she can see a couple gawkers come closer to get a glimpse of the action but Rey turns around slightly, holding her body in a slightly awkward hover but her discomfort makes no matter. They don’t get to see this. This is private. It’s Kylo’s heart and his breaking in unison at the memory he just shared. He’s breathing heavy for a while and he doesn’t cry although Rey is pretty sure he might still. Maybe he should. She doesn’t let go off him even when they eventually fall asleep.

 

Rey and Kylo wake up to a certain intimate awkwardness that always befalls people who unexpectedly shared more than they’d planned to. As they disentangle themselves from the other, they avoid eye contact and soon, Kylo excuses himself for the bathroom, Rey sitting void of thoughts for the time being until he comes back and she takes her bathroom break right after.

“Is everything alright in there?” Hux asks when he sees her what must be very pale face. “Mr. Edgelord looks like he’s seen a ghost.”

“Don’t call him that,” Rey seethes, barely honoring the snively ginger with a look. “Everything’s fine. Just do your job an get us something to eat.”

That was harsher than maybe necessary but Hux’s evident lack of tact unnerves her and carries her over to the employee washroom with a stomp. Rey does her business and re-emerges to wash her hands and face, a crestfallen face greeting her in the mirror. Her green eyes look back at her sad and searching.

How does he live with that? She asks herself, her heart breaking for him all over again. Still she knows he has to get herself together and quick. Her own experience taught her that the best thing anyone can do, is treat people like Kylo and her normally. No walking on eggshells, so mincing words more than sensible. He’s been through a lot. So has she. So there is that. She bends over to drink a couple gulps of water from the sink, gurgles some more and spits it out. Her hair is a damp mess, so she finger-combs through it quickly and then tries to rub off what little of her waterproof mascara had succumbed to her tears with her fingertips. When she deems herself somewhat presentable, he takes a deep breath and braces herself to smile and meet Kylo like nothing has changed. Except everything kind of has.

 

When she gets back, brushing past Hux without a word, she sees that the man had at least gotten them the lunch she asked for; salad with chicken, most likely from the museum’s restaurant by way of making haste. Kylo has waited to start eating but he still won’t look at her. He doesn’t until they’re done with their food and way into a game of cards, chosen to keep occupied and thinking of everything else. After a while of this, Rey breaks the silence and searches for his eyes.

“Thank you for telling me all of that,” she says sincerely. “I’m sure it isn’t easy.”

“Thank you for listening. I never really talked about it like that before,” he says. “It helped, I think. A little.”

“That’s something,” she tries a smile.

“I did fuck up the mood though, didn’t I?” Kylo joins her in that attempt.

“It’s alright,” she says and then contemplates him for a while, trying to assess the situation and tries some tentative humour. “Look at us, two orphans in a glass box playing hearts.” She snorts by accident about the unintended double entendre. “In all senses of the word, I guess.”

Kylo smiles and it lights up the whole bloody fish tank. “Now if anybody says art isn’t transformative,” he agrees softly and then goes back to his draw of cards. They finish the game in a softer, lighter mood and afterwards settle in to watch another of Rey’s preferred sitcoms. When that’s done, Kylo puts the laptop back at the foot of the bed and turns to Rey again, once he’s lying comfortably on his thick pillow.

 

“So, what do we do now?” He asks her. “Want me to read you more of my book?”

On a whim, Rey replies: “No, I think we should make out.”

Kylo does a super quick, almost unnoticeable double-take and then decides she’s kidding: “Yeah, right.”

“No, I’m serious. I can feel people getting bored,” she says, although she hasn’t paid attention to their viewers for hours. “They wanna see some action. Get some fodder for their instastories.”

Kylo grabs his chest theatrically like she’s wounded him. “So you only wanna mack on me for the attention?”

“You’re an idiot,” she says, rolling her eyes at him with just as much gusto. “I’m being _passionate_ about my craft.”

“I’ll take that,” he finally shrugs and throws up his arms like he’s waiting for her to get in there.

Rey is suddenly shy and briefly wonders what has gotten into her. It’s not pity, that much is sure–but if it isn’t that, what is it? Maybe it would be better yet, if it were. Still, she's made that decision now, so she can't really back-paddle. She tells herself it's no big deal. Technically, this _is_ in her contract, so really, she's just doing her job.

“Okay, so how do we do this?” She asks, aiming for a professional demeanour.

Kylo tilts his head and studies her as if she had six eyes: “You _have_ kissed people before, yeah?”

“Of course,” Rey says quickly. “I was just...thinking about the angles, or...positions. For prime visibility.”

“Screw visibility,” Kylo scoffs and then reaches over to her, using the momentum to bring his body to hover above hers, one hand steadying himself on either side of her frame.

He looks at her eyes for a breathless second, then at her lips as if to take aim and then he’s kissing her.

 

His lips are impossibly plump and soft, two cushions enveloping her lips in what seems almost a well trained craft. There is no tiny movement out of place, no press of miniscule muscle misused. The press of his face on hers is gentle, yet reassuring of a certain want, a pronounced desire. Rey is at once sure that it’s all make believe. Even if their audience can’t see them at their best angle, this is still by all means a stage kiss. Sure of that, Rey can play along and kiss him back a little. It’s all play-pretend, so it doesn’t really matter anyway. Her assuredness only wavers briefly, when Kylo ads tongue (again, very astute at what he’s doing and so smoothly, at first she doesn’t even notice it). Tongue is unusual for the stage. But then again, Kylo has always struck her as more of a method actor and they weren’t as opposed to ‘real’ kisses. Indeed having them feel real helped their...well, method. So she relaxes yet again and just enjoys the fact that she is being kissed again. It has been a while, after all. And he’s good at it to boot.

When they come up for some proper air after what feels like it could have been anything between minutes and days, Rey feels her cheeks flush and looks up at Kylo who is kind of grinning, his own cheeks pink as well.

“So...you’re pretty good at this, huh?” She says for the lack of anything better to say.

“You’re not so bad yourself.”

Rey throws a sneaky glance to the window. “Think they liked it?”

“They’re bound to.”

Into whatever Rey was going to say crackles Hux’s voice, tinny and metallic over the intercom, sounding prissy. “Dinner’s here.”

With no trace of hesitation, Kylo whips around and grabs his phone from the nightstand and types away.

“What are you doing?” Rey asks. The sudden absence of his weight on her makes her feel oddly bereft.

“I’m telling him to fuck off.”

“No!” Rey says, happily scandalized. “Let me see!” She tries to grab his phone and can decipher that he merely typed ‘We’re good thanks’. “We’re good?” She asks him, sort of put off that Kylo just decided she wasn’t hungry.

“We can’t let our audience hang now and bore them with more of us eating, can we?” Kylo asks and she figures he does have a point there.

 

After some more stage kissing with tongue, Hux informs them that they’re all good to clock out for the day and the two of them walk out the museum together talking about nothing in particular. As they arrive the place where they parted ways the night before, Rey’s stomach rumbles loud enough to carry over the city bustle.

“You’re hungry,” Kylo states needlessly.

“You made me miss dinner,” she reminds him and he contemplates that for a second.

“Hm, I think I can rectify that,” he says. “Wanna get dinner?” Rey deliberates any possible implications a dinner, off duty, on their own time, might have, then decides to disregard them. “How do you feel about mexican food?”

 

They arrive at a homey-looking place called “The Cantina” a nice walk through the neighbourhood later. As soon as Kylo steps into the little restaurant, appropriately decorated with any and all mexican kitsch, a giant, slim and very, very hairy man emerges from the back and runs to him with what sounds almost like a roar. The big fellow hugs Kylo so hard, he very well lifts him off his feet and Rey sees the man’s tan arms and cheeks shine in the candle lit venue, although they almost look like a dark brown from the thickly growing hair covering nearly every inch of him. This must be by far the hairiest man she’s ever seen–his beard grows so thick and wide, it’s practically growing into the thick, for lack of a better word, mane on his head and the hairs on his chest.

“Chuy!” Kylo exclaims and the guy bellows something unintelligible into his neck in response.

“Sure, we’re gonna sit down!” Kylo affirms. “How is everybody?”

Chuy nods his head when he let’s go of Kylo as if to say “All is good” and then sees them to their table. Once he’s gone to get them the usual, as Rey suspects, Kylo says: “He’s practically my uncle. One of my Dad’s best friends. They used to work together back in the day, then he opened this restaurant. We got back in touch after my Mom died. I come here roughly every two weeks since.”

“That C. in your name stand for Chuy?” Rey asks, playing with a napkin.

“Aren’t you the little detective?” Kylo grins.

“Just paying attention,” she shrugs nonchalantly, although she is a little pleased with herself for having guessed right.

Kylo smiles brightly in return. “Pick anything you want from the menu, we don’t pay here.”

 

They share a nice, relaxed meal, the food savoury and rich in flavour and sustenance. After a while, Chuy comes over to sit with them and they have a fun little conversation of which Rey only comprehends half because the man mumbles like his hair is growing _into_ his mouth. But what he lacks in understandability, Chuy makes up for in obvious heart and Rey enjoys seeing Kylo so happy after the day they’ve had. She feels like he needed this a lot, a splash of familiarity after reliving the last two years that must’ve been so very hard on him. She thinks she needed this too, in a way.

 

After Kylo has said goodbye and Rey herself got to experience a proper Chuy-bear-ish hug, Kylo walks her to the next Subway station, telling her some random stories about how, eons ago, his Dad had taken him on a business trip with Chuy along for the ride. By the time they reach the station, Rey’s head is spinning with fragments of anecdotes and her mouth is set in a permanent grin.

 _This is nice_ , she thinks. _Who would’ve thought?_

“Well, I guess I’ll see you tomorrow,” Kylo says once they’ve stopped walking. “Day four. Just past halftime, huh?”

“Yeah,” Rey says and it’s the first time she thinks about it.

He’s right, the week is already half over. Peculiar. She didn’t think time would go by that quickly after all. She doesn’t all the way know how she feels about that. While she is still pondering this, Kylo darts down to her quickly and kisses her cheek again.

“Text me when you’re home safe, okay?” He asks and when she nods he turns around and walks briskly away, a certain swing in his step she isn’t sure was there before.

“But I don’t have your number,” she mutters when she comes to, the ghost of his lips still burning on her skin.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Most of the twenty questions are taken from here: https://www.powerofpositivity.com/20-questions-ask-someone-will-reveal-true-self/
> 
> Comments and kudos are a fanfic writer's livelihood. <3


	4. DAY FOUR

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally, an update...real life is mind-bendingly busy right now, so this took a while and is a lot shorter than usual.
> 
> As you know, I have no beta and no proper time to edit and I'm telling you right now, it's not my best work. I'm not all the way happy with the pacing but I want this story out before the movie, so bare with me.
> 
> This will get a good edit-if not a partial re-write as soon as I have a little breathing room. I hope you enjoy this somewhat a little anyway.

DAY FOUR

 

The fourth day of Rey’s work at the museum starts with Rey noticing a line in front of the regular entrance and then, too fast for her to process, someone shouts her name and suddenly that line of people moves towards her like a fighting formation. Shocked still, she doesn’t move until the first of the around eight or nine teenagers is upon her. Probably the bravest of the bunch, the blonde girl approaches her with the words: “You’re Rey, right?”

Rey can’t be sure but some of the other girls seem familiar, like she’s seen them from the corner of her eyes before, their eyes studying Kylo and her through the glass of the aquarium.

“Yeah,” she says and smiles, feeling like she shouldn’t engage for some reason.

“You’re Kylo’s girlfriend,” the brave one says. Rey just nods, still uncomfortable with the lying. “Oh my God, you have to take a picture with us!”

Because Rey hasn’t had her first cup of coffee yet, she’s in the right mood to tell her that she doesn’t  _ have _ to do bloody anything but she thinks better of it, smiles politely and let’s them take pictures with her in seven different constellations and poses until she somehow manages to exit pavement left toward the employees entrance.

It’s not like she never had people want to take pictures with her. At the stage doors of her West End productions, there’d always been four or five people waiting for the stars of the shows and sometimes they wanted to snap pictures with her as well, or have her sign their playbills but nothing like this had ever happened to her in London: being recognised on the street like that. Recognised for being someone’s girlfriend no less. That’s hardly what Rey wants to be famous for. But it hadn’t been unpleasant at least. She wonders what Kylo will say when she tells him about her run in with his fan girls and when she turns the corner and sees him standing there, she quickens her steps and takes a breath to call over to him but then she takes another step and sees that he is talking to Mr. Snoke in what seems to be hushed tones so she stops in her tracks. Kylo’s nodding, fists clenched at his sides and Snoke smiles fatherly, pats his shoulders and then turns away, facing her. Kylo leaves for the control room before he sees her and Rey starts walking again.

“Miss Kenobi,” Snoke says in greeting and they meet halfway. “I was just congratulating Kylo on your great run so far.”

“Yes, it’s going quite good,” she says, trying to figure out why the old man still peeves her.

“The press is excellent,” he nods and his beady eyes fix her like he’s trying to pry her darkest secrets from her brain. “Do continue on.”

He puts a leathery, almost grey hand on her bare forearm and Rey has to hold her breath to not shiver from the cold. It’s like he’s had his hands in ice water before, like he already died and came back to haunt her.

“Y-yes, we will,” she says and fights to smile back at him. 

Rey can still feel his ice cold touch on her skin when she changes in the control room. At least Hux seems to have stepped out for the moment, so that’s a small blessing. 

 

“Sorry, I didn’t text last night,” Rey says upon walking into the fishtank, the door still ajar from when Kylo went in before her.

He doesn’t seem to really hear her though, sitting on the edge of the bed working off his sneakers, looking very immersed in the mundane task. “What?”

“Text, um,” Rey repeats and isn’t sure why she’s suddenly clammy. She’s been nervous all morning for some reason but she’d chastised herself thoroughly in the subway and had hoped to be over it by now. Evidently, she is not. “You told me to text you once I got home last night. But I didn’t have your number.”

“Oh, sure, yeah,” Kylo is still occupied with his shoes and barely looks up at her.

“Do you want it?” Rey asks but he just glances up at her, looking confused, as if he’s not sure why she’s still talking. “My number, do you want it?”

“Oh,” he says and finally it seems like she’s getting through to him.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah, sorry,” Kylo hurries. “I didn’t sleep well, is all.”

“It’s fine, I’ll let you nap,” she jests, trying to lighten up the room and Kylo nods.

“Too kind of you,” he says and it isn’t ironic or snide but it troubles her all the same.

Still, he takes her at her word and gets into bed and Rey forgoes the coffee making to join him under the covers. Once she’s lying down, Kylo reaches for her, turning her so she’s once again snug in his arms with him spooning her and he tips his nose against her neck, burying his face in her hair. There’s something unspoken ghosting around them and she can’t make sense of it but she doesn’t dare to speak lest she turn him away. It feels like he needs this, like she’s a stuffed bear he wants to cuddle close. Her nerves spike again but that too, is something she doesn’t want to question so she closes her eyes and doesn’t sleep for a minute.

 

When Kylo rouses again, it’s roughly an hour later and, like magic, he’s back to normal. He gets up to make them coffee and soon their little room is filled with the scent of mocca and cream and outside, people have gathered to watch them again.

“I had a really nice time last night,” Rey says eventually, when Kylo has handed her her cup and silence has once again settled around them.

“Me too,” he says and smiles softly. “Chuy loved you.”

“He’s great,” Rey laughs and adjusts her sitting position to be able to drink better. “Very hairy.”

Kylo just laughs and mirrors her movement.

“Did the nap help?” She turns her head slightly to him, finding that the circles underneath his eyes aren’t quite as pronounced as before.

“Yes,” he nods.

“Good, I thought you were mad at me for a second.”

“Why would I be?” He sounds sincerely baffled.

“I don’t know,” Rey admits, feeling her cheeks pink and her pulse rise again. “I’m being weird today.”

“Care to elaborate?” She can see his head tilt from the corner of her eye but doesn’t dare look at him.

“Well, for starters,” she says, “I was  _ nervous _ on the way over. I think it’s because of the kissing yesterday.”

“That’s...interesting.” If possible, he’s staring even harder at her now. “Why would that make you nervous?”

“My woman brain, I guess,” Rey replies, trying to be funny about it, wondering why she is even telling him this in the first place. But something about him makes it easy for her to be honest. Maybe it’s the fact that he’s been through the same shit as her. Maybe it’s because he seems all the more fragile for it. “It’s all messing with my head, this make-believe stuff.”

“But you’re an actress,” he muses.

“I am, but we’ve been around each other three days straight and I kind of forgot that I hate your guts,” she shrugs, not really knowing what she is trying to say or where it’ll go.

“You still hate my guts?” He asks.

“No.” That’s the truth, not all of the truth but some of it. “I just...don’t know what to do with you.”

“Do you think more kissing would help?” He asks and Rey’s head snaps to him. Yes. This is what she’s been waiting for, what she’d been nervous about. Although not really nervous. Rather...excited.

“Not really,” she says. 

“We’ll see,” he says and a giant hand lands on her cheek while he takes her coffee cup out of her grasp with the other and puts it to the side.

 

Kylo smiles at her and Rey’s heart takes flight. When he kisses her again –not even waiting with the tongue at all– Rey sighs against his lips and thinks in the same moment his tongue slides along her upper lip that she does not remember ever having sighed into a kiss before.

_ This is all fake _ , she reminds herself. But what if it isn’t? They did have a really nice dinner together. And they connected the day before, told each other deeply private things and found kinship there, a shared past and sense of loss and forlornness, that took one to know another. And he is funny and kind in his way, even if he can be a pretentious douchebag-arsehole if he wants to be. But there is something about him. Something she can’t quite place. It bleeds through his touches, his hands on her and his weight pushing her down with him. Lying underneath him feels natural, comforting and while her head is wildly confused, her body is a hundred percent surely signed up for whatever he’s doing to her. His touches stir her up in that delicious, naughty way, making her blood pool south of her navel and her toes curl. She rolls her body into his on instinct and he presses back. Rey gasps and he chuckles against her lips.

“Rey,” he says, muffled by her face. “Just now, was that your round-about way of saying you’re into me?”

“No,” she snaps, way too soon, way too found-out, six octaves too high.

“Because I’m into you,” he locks his eyes on hers and she can’t breathe for a second.

“Huh,” she says. “Even though I’m a miserable fencer?”

“Forget about that.” He makes a face. “You have other talents.”

With that, he is on her again. While they kiss, Rey’s brain runs a thousand miles a minute. Is he right? Is she into him? Was that what she was trying to say? Maybe. More importantly: Had he just said he was into her? What does that mean? Does he have a crush? Does he want to date her? Does he want to sleep with her? Is he serious or was he kidding? Are these kisses not fake after all?

“Rey,” again his words come mumbled tight between their mouths. “I can hear you think.”

“Sorry,” she says. “I didn’t think you’d be into me.”

“Is that so hard to imagine?” Kylo turns the question mark into a lazy peck on the corner of her mouth.

“No, I don’t know, I just…,” she’s babbling. She feels like she’s fourteen again. Her brain short-circuits because it’s too much, so she blurts out the first thing that jumps to her mind to postpone this leg of the conversation: “Do you miss your parents?

Kylo’s head falls onto her collar-bone and he puffs out a harsh breath, inadvertently blowing raspberry on her skin. Rey shudders instead of giggling, which would have been the much more opportune response.

“And there goes my erection,” he sighs and lifts himself up to his elbow to look at her slightly scandalized face. “I miss them every day. Do you miss yours?”

“I hardly remember them,” Rey says truthfully, ignoring that her cheeks burn not with sad memories but red, wild heat. “I think I remember the idea of them. That sense of belonging.”

“I never really had that with mine,” Kylo says and brings up his hand to draw patterns across her shoulders.

“M-maybe that’s worse,” she stutters. He could make it a little easier to focus. “Do you feel damaged?”

“What would you say?” He asks but he barely hears him because his fingers trail upward to her neck and the sensation jolts through her from head to her core. She’s unable to answer.

“Exactly,” he says.

“Not irreparable though,” Rey manages and is shocked by her own voice, so fickle and raw.

 

“Please don’t tell me you like me because you want to fix me?” Kylo says and stops his attentions to her skin. “I can’t be fixed, Rey.”

“No, that’s not what I meant,” she says, more chagrined by the lack of touch than his jumping to conclusions - or better stereotypes.

“Really? Because I should be clear on that,” he says, very serious all of the sudden. “You’re right, I’m damaged, I’d go as far as to say I’m pretty damn broken. And I’m going to stay that way. If this is going to be a thing, you should know that.”

“Is this going to be a thing?” She asks, because, let’s be real, that question is circa two to ten hours overdue if she wishes to remain sane.

“This can be anything you want it to be,” he shrugs.  _ Ugh. _

“What do  _ you _ want it to be?” Rey asks and decides that he won’t have it that easy. If he wants something, he better come out and say it.

In turn, Kylo smirks at her and leans into her again, the kiss he gives her soft as a feather and sweet like sin. “I want to do this until I turn blue.” Another agonizingly slow kiss. “And I want to get to know you, I wanna be around you.” A shorter one, a little more pressure behind it. “When this is over, I want us to trade this bed for my own.” 

“So, a sex thing?” She asks before he can kiss her again.

“Rey, you’re ruining the mood,” he laments dramatically and leans back so he can glare at her without going cross-eyed.

“You started it,” she argues. “I just wanna know what’s what.”

“Well, I’m not saying let’s get married next week,” he shrugs.

“Me neither.” Heavens, no. “But I want to know if this is physical for you or if it’s more.”

“I like you,” he says quietly and his features shift into a sternness that screams sincerity and an absolute will to be believed. “And like I said, I want to be around you. There’s nobody else I want to be around more right now, either. And I’d like it if you wanted the same.”

“Fine,” Rey says, although it barely carries along her scarce breath.

“Great.”

 

They forego lunch for the sake of making-out, that’s how long they’re at it. Still, while the making-out is fun, Rey is a very physical being and since it’s been a while and now he’s got her all hot and bothered, it becomes increasingly frustrating to get nothing more than beard burn and infuriating friction from him. There’s a steady, demanding pounding desire coursing through her that she can’t satisfy and she groans eventually, pent-up and wanting.

“You gotta calm down a little,” he whispers, somewhat bemused.

“But this is annoying.” One, because she can’t go further and two, because he doesn’t seem to want to as urgently as she does. Does he maybe not find her as attractive or appealing?

“I know,” he says though, putting his forehead against hers to calm her down.

“Why are we in public again?” She huffs. His efforts are rather fruitless, too.

“Contracts.”

“It sucks,” she complains.

“I know,” he says again.

She kisses him, because apparently, she has no self-control and her body has taken the reins over her brain. Kylo doesn’t seem to mind. He indulges her, kisses her back freely and on two occasions runs a full, large palm across her breast, crazing her nipples and making her moan lewdly. Spurred to recklessness by that, Rey dips her hand underneath his sweat pants waistband and she’s almost got him in her grip, when he grabs her wrist and holds her there.

“Still in public,” he chastises softly. Even though they’re covered by the blanket and no one would know anyway if she would just-

“God damnit.” Rey stops herself. She is not going to give a man a handjob with fifteen people watching. Horny as hell or not, that’s not gonna happen. So she retracts her hand and bunches his shirt up into her fist and grunts unflatteringly into his chest.

“I can’t wait to get you home,” he says huskily into her hair and it shoots straight down, making Rey wince soundlessly.

“Oh, so I’m coming home with you?” She says with an edge solely from sexual frustration rather than unwillingness.

“Do you not want to?”

“Obviously I find you appalling,” she says and bites the flesh she can reach. “Gross.”

Kylo’s stomach rumbles with a chuckle and then he brings her up, grabbing a hold on her arms and turning her over so he’s once more on her.

 

With his broad back turned to the glass, he shelters her from view as he kisses her again and when Rey opens her eyes and he breaks away, he smiles down at her so freely and purely, it makes her heart ache. She can’t help smile back. Again, time passes over his ministrations on her and everything blurs together after a while, with a few highlights standing out. That one time, when he grabs her arse and pulls her against his bulging pants or the other when he moans into her ear which must’ve slipped past his tight self-control or that one moment, when he brings his big, big hand around her throat. He doesn’t squeeze or anything, he just holds her there in a loose grip for a moment before he kisses her again and Rey’s eyes go wide for a second. No one has ever done that to her before. And she find that she  _ liked _ it. She makes a mental note to remind him of that in the near future.

 

“Okay, we gotta take a break or I’ll forget myself,” Kylo says eventually when he’s dry-humped her two or three times, obvious enough to draw so much attention that someone felt summoned to tap against the window. Probably because there’s children there somewhere.

“Good call,” Rey says, cheeks flush from lust and shame alike and pries herself away from him.

“Don’t look,” Kylo says and stares at the ceiling, breathing hard. “People have their phones out.”

“You gotta be kidding me,” Rey huffs.

“I want you so bad I could scream right now,” he says and then does scream. Not overly loud but a testament to their shared frustration. Rey laughs, once again glad that their little fish tank is sound-proof.

“Come on, let’s be boring for a while,” she says. “Read you something.”

They do their best to be as uneventful as they can for the rest of the day and spend a nice dinner and evening barely touching each other. Rey tries to enjoy the constant current beyond everything they do instead of getting mad from it. It works somewhat, at least that’s what she tells herself. If anything, she hardly computes the end of the day at the museum or the brisk walk to Kylo’s apartment just a few blocks away from the museum. 

 

“Very nice place,” Rey says as she comes back to herself. 

Kylo’s apartment isn’t too big, an open plan kitchen adjacent to a somewhat spacious living room with room-high windows overlooking a busy Manhattan street, a small bathroom with a tiled shower and a regular sized bedroom big enough for a dresser and his giant bed. The major piece of furniture is his gigantic bookshelf, it takes up the entire left wall of his living room, from floor to ceiling and is packed thick with books upon books upon books. The lower row of the shelf houses primarily records though and there is one small section of BluRays and Boxes as well.

“Wow,” Rey exhales when Kylo points her to it. “That’s impressive.”

“I’m kind of a nerd,” he says sheepishly.

“No, that’s so cool,” she says. “What are they sorted by?”

“Genres and sub-genres and then alphabetical,” he answers, “the records are alphabetical though.”

“So there’s big money in touring productions, huh?” Rey says, brushing her fingers across a couple of books. She knows how the rents are in Manhattan and she would probably never in a million years be able to afford a place like this.

“Definitely not,” Kylo half-laughs. “I bought this from what inherited from Dad. It’s... a capital investment, really. With a view.”

“Well, mark me down as impressed and slightly turned off by your richness,” Rey tells him over her shoulder.

“Turned off?” Kylo asks dramatically. “Why, such a shame, when I was just about to ask you to bed.”

“I’ll push through,” Rey says and turns around. “You just gotta switch off the lights so I don’t see all that splendour.” 

“You’re an idiot,” Kylo laughs affectionately and just like that, he scoops her up in his arms and carries her bridal-style into his bedroom. 

He leaves the light on.

 

They spend the night together in that magical first-time way that lasts all night, peppered with little naps and with waking the other up because they haven’t had their fill of each other yet. Kylo is strong and skilled, perfectly built for her and with a stamina to match hers. They’ve gone two and a half rounds until they collapse on the bed together in the wee hours of the morning, Rey’s head is spinning from dehydration and her legs hurt from the exertion, already telling of majorly sore bones the next day. 

“So much for going to sleep,” Kylo mutters, maneuvering her to lie on his chest for a while.

“Yeah, who started that last round anyway?” Rey asks groggily.

“Does it matter?” 

“Not really,” she mumbles and then smiles, remembering a moment from before. “You know these things you don’t know you like until someone does it to you?”

“Ah-huh?”

“When you choked me,” she says, recalling the moment he did it again just a couple of minutes before. That moment when she’d caught his hand squeezed it tighter around her throat to signal that she wanted him to do make it tighter and harder and he had moaned and pushed into a new gear, working himself to his climax while she saw stars. “That was a first. I liked that. A  _ lot _ .”

He just laughs and pulls her tighter. 

 

“We gotta get some sleep now,” he says eventually, “Or we’ll be no fun for the zoo-goers tomorrow.”

“Ugh, screw them all,” Rey says. “I just want you to be in a better mood tomorrow morning than you were today.”

There’s a sudden tension in Kylo’s body, slightly upsetting Rey’s calming heartbeat. 

“That had nothing to do with you, you know that, right?” He asks.

“I guess,” she says, smoothing out the hairs on his chest lightly. “You know you can tell me if something’s bothering you.”

“I’ll tell you everything tomorrow, I promise,” Kylo says and then yawns heartily. “Just not tonight, I don’t wanna tarnish this. I just want to fall asleep with you and remember how amazing it feels-” and now he lowers his voice to a scandalous whisper, “to come in your mouth.”

Rey smacks him on the chest for that and Kylo cackles, then stretches to turn off the light.

“Oh,  _ now _ you want to sleep?” Rey complains as the room goes pitch dark and Kylo comes back to her and kisses her. Once, twice and then she understands that he has no intention of sleeping yet after all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really hope you don't hate it :D I'm always happy about comments and they help to get this done so much! Thank you all, you're all wonderful!


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